On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 1:37 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
On 1/9/2014 11:26 AM, David Miller wrote:
At this point I really don't see why RedHat doesn't just offer RHEL + updates + extra channels for free and then only charge for support. This would put them on a real equal ground with Canonical.
I suspect doing so would cut heavily into their revenue stream, as many business IT operations types who are told they have to run RHEL because ___ requires it would just install it and never pay for support. by keeping the free version separately branded, however slight the actual difference, discourages this except by those in the know.
Probably has something to do with being able to require paid support for _all_ instances of RHEL you are running to get any. It then takes at least a little effort on the user's end to install CentOS on the less critical hosts instead of just cloning everything and paying for support on one copy.