Why does Red Hat tolerate CentOS? The Community ENTerprise Operating System is an identical binary clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (minus the trademarks), compiled from the source code RPMs that Red Hat conveniently provides on its FTP site. It is also completely free, as in beer. CentOS provides no paid support, but it does track Red Hat updates and patches closely, and usually makes them available within a few hours or at most a few days of the upstream provider, which it refers to for legal reasons as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Free support for CentOS can be found in numerous places around the web, and a few third parties offer modestly priced paid support for those who want it.
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spikeb
16 years 25 weeks 2 days 16 hours ago
the answer to the title is: not
the answer to the title is: not at all. free marketing.
aboutblank
16 years 25 weeks 2 days 11 hours ago
Not much. The distributors of CentOS
Not much. The distributors of CentOS don't provide the same level of support that Red Hat does. The cost of distributing software is trivial compared to the cost of providing support for a computing environment.
kiba
16 years 25 weeks 2 days 15 min ago
Duh, you can't simply imitate a
Duh, you can't simply imitate a product and expect to win.
In economic, sometime your imitators can't simply catch up to simply of the virtue of you being first in the market.
This is called first mover advantage.
I suspect Red Hat have that advantage because they're copied multiples times and competition increased but yet their revenue continue to grow(as well not seeing much threat from copycats.
Of course the imitators will probably catch up to your level, but the question is: Will you stay on top of your game or will they out-imitate and out-innovate you?