1) Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. (This quote was relevant here even before IBM literally acquired Redhat). 2) Redhat offers support; and that support

1) Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. (This quote was relevant here even before IBM literally acquired Redhat). 2) Redhat offers support; and that support is a potentially valuable service worth the cost. If you want that support, you need to use RHEL. 3) If you are developing for a regulated industry, RHEL may be a pre-certified base you can use. This can substantially reduce the cost and risk with certifying your entire system compared with trying to use a not-yet certified base. As someone who develops for RHEL because of (3), CentOS filled the niche of 'development environment for RHEL without needing to worry about licencing issues'. It also served as a way out of vendor lock in if you wanted to stop paying for RHEL without needing to migrate your system.