I've always had a personal preference for debian/ubuntu, but in practice I've had to work on applications that ultimately had to run in highly regulated environ

I've always had a personal preference for debian/ubuntu, but in practice I've had to work on applications that ultimately had to run in highly regulated environments where RHEL was the only approved platform. Having the ability to have lots of testing environments running CentOS without huge licensing fees was a win. I don't know the specifics of pricing but I hope RHEL can ease the burden this may place on startups etc by offering a generous free non-production licenses if they don't already.