Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
Then there is the whole convincing these firms and agencies that since CentOS is a duplication of Redhat's system it is therefore certified by the laws of transitivity, but who knows if they will buy it...
Well I wouldn't be surprised if a agency/certification thing would not support you under CentOS if they support RHEL. It would be sad but not completely crazy.
Those firms and agencies are likely more strict on what they support than software/hardware vendors. And there's quite a few software and hardware vendors that don't support CentOS but do support RHEL.
I suppose it mostly comes down to the organization behind it and the relationships Red Hat in this case has with those companies in order to help track/escalate problems/fixes/etc easier then organizations like CentOS that are less formal. And yes I believe if a bug is found in CentOS it's almost certain to appear in RHEL, but without reproduction under RHEL the vendor is unlikely to approach Red Hat and say you have a bug in your product even though I was using CentOS.
nate