CentOS was never officially an "official free version". After Red Hat acquired CentOS, they positioned as a base for open source projects to develop on RHEL (wh

CentOS was never officially an "official free version". After Red Hat acquired CentOS, they positioned as a base for open source projects to develop on RHEL (which was what Red Hat needed and why they hired the developers in the first place). Of course, users that just needed a free RHEL kept using it that way with the added bonus of corporate backing, so much that Scientific Linux said "screw it we'll just use CentOS".