On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 1:37 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com