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>Question: Why is RHEL so popular in enterprise environments? The answer is not CentOS. It's being early to the market, and incumbency. It's that RHEL was (and

>Question: Why is RHEL so popular in enterprise environments? The answer is not CentOS. It's being early to the market, and incumbency. It's that RHEL was (and probably still is) by far the most serious enterprise Linux for a long time. It's popular in enterprise environments because it was popular in enterprises back in the day. Anything to do with CentOS is a functional irrelevancy to most of the big customers.

FireBeyond 3y ago
I worked for a healthcare IT company that did a lot of work in Ubuntu. We discovered this - that there were two types of customers - the ones who did not care what OS we used underlying our software and ecosystem, and the ones who did. For the ones who did not care, well, good. For the ones that did care, not a single one cared in a "we want Ubuntu" way, everyone said "we want Red Hat". The support side of things was always the argument, and still is. We know that for many it's a crutch, a safety net, people can argue all day long about how useful support can be, but in the end, it's still a very large checkmark, and Red Hat gets that checkmark every time.
- gary_0 3y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for buying Red Hat.
tomwheeler 3y ago
> It's popular in enterprise environments because it was popular in enterprises back in the day. And so were Solaris and IRIX and HP/UX, until they weren't. And that happened in large part because Red Hat Linux was accessible to tech enthusiasts. Not many could justify a Sun Ultra 1 or SGI Indigo for their homelab, but they could download Red Hat Linux for free and install it on an old PC. Eventually, these people began to question the price/performance of proprietary UNIX and hardware for their projects at work. The combination of lower price, widespread expertise, and commercial support from Linux vendors (especially Red Hat) circa 2000 is what marked the beginning of the end for proprietary UNIX. And even when Red Hat Linux gave way to RHEL, it was still far less expensive than what the legacy UNIX vendors offered, plus clones such as Whitebox Enterprise Linux or CentOS were readily available for people to keep their RHEL skills current at home. That's helped to keep it going, but once IBM makes RHEL inaccessible to enthusiasts, the decline of RHEL in the marketplace will surely follow.
- yawaramin 3y ago
  And they can still download CentOS Stream for free and install it in their homelabs. In other words, exactly what you described enabled Red Hat to succeed.
  - tomwheeler 3y ago
    The fact that so many people have expressed concern about recent changes by Red Hat suggests to me that the company has failed to communicate effectively and/or many people no longer trust Red Hat.
    - yawaramin 3y ago
      If many people mistakenly believe something, does that make it true? Was the Earth flat 500 years ago?
      - tehbeard 3y ago
        What an odd comparison, and ignoring the context of the issue at hand. Both a failure of communication in how RH have worded their stance, and breach of a social contract (The shortening of the CentOS 8 support mid-cycle that kicked this off) have caused the current tension. The failure to communicate, matters not about truth or "lies" with whatever you seem to be implying with your comparison. If falsehoods are interpretable from what was said, they have poorly communicated. Doubly so if they know their relationship with the target audience is already strained by past behaviour.
        yawaramin 3y ago
        In this age of social media and 'extremely online' people, even the smallest misunderstanding can be magnified into an uproar, especially if it's in the interests of certain people to put pressure on RH to behave in a way that benefits these people. It's really convenient to confidently state, with no knowledge of their internal constraints and decisions, that RH screwed up. It's harder to hold off on passing judgment until all the facts are clear.
krylon 3y ago
I was under the impression that CentOS mostly competed with Debian or Ubuntu, with the added benefit that switching from CentOS to RHEL was very easy. RHEL probably competes more with proprietary Unix systems (although they all seem to be fading to oblivion these days), SLES, or Windows. Maybe z/OS on mainframes, but I suspect Linux deployments on those machines are more like "We already have the mainframe, let's buy a couple more CPUs and RAM and put Linux in an extra LPAR or VM instead of buying new servers".

FireBeyond 3y ago

I worked for a healthcare IT company that did a lot of work in Ubuntu. We discovered this - that there were two types of customers - the ones who did not care what OS we used underlying our software and ecosystem, and the ones who did. For the ones who did not care, well, good. For the ones that did care, not a single one cared in a "we want Ubuntu" way, everyone said "we want Red Hat". The support side of things was always the argument, and still is. We know that for many it's a crutch, a safety net, people can argue all day long about how useful support can be, but in the end, it's still a very large checkmark, and Red Hat gets that checkmark every time.

gary_0 3y ago
Nobody ever got fired for buying Red Hat.

tomwheeler 3y ago

> It's popular in enterprise environments because it was popular in enterprises back in the day. And so were Solaris and IRIX and HP/UX, until they weren't. And that happened in large part because Red Hat Linux was accessible to tech enthusiasts. Not many could justify a Sun Ultra 1 or SGI Indigo for their homelab, but they could download Red Hat Linux for free and install it on an old PC. Eventually, these people began to question the price/performance of proprietary UNIX and hardware for their projects at work. The combination of lower price, widespread expertise, and commercial support from Linux vendors (especially Red Hat) circa 2000 is what marked the beginning of the end for proprietary UNIX. And even when Red Hat Linux gave way to RHEL, it was still far less expensive than what the legacy UNIX vendors offered, plus clones such as Whitebox Enterprise Linux or CentOS were readily available for people to keep their RHEL skills current at home. That's helped to keep it going, but once IBM makes RHEL inaccessible to enthusiasts, the decline of RHEL in the marketplace will surely follow.

yawaramin 3y ago
And they can still download CentOS Stream for free and install it in their homelabs. In other words, exactly what you described enabled Red Hat to succeed.
- tomwheeler 3y ago
  The fact that so many people have expressed concern about recent changes by Red Hat suggests to me that the company has failed to communicate effectively and/or many people no longer trust Red Hat.
  - yawaramin 3y ago
    If many people mistakenly believe something, does that make it true? Was the Earth flat 500 years ago?
    - tehbeard 3y ago
      What an odd comparison, and ignoring the context of the issue at hand. Both a failure of communication in how RH have worded their stance, and breach of a social contract (The shortening of the CentOS 8 support mid-cycle that kicked this off) have caused the current tension. The failure to communicate, matters not about truth or "lies" with whatever you seem to be implying with your comparison. If falsehoods are interpretable from what was said, they have poorly communicated. Doubly so if they know their relationship with the target audience is already strained by past behaviour.
      - yawaramin 3y ago
        In this age of social media and 'extremely online' people, even the smallest misunderstanding can be magnified into an uproar, especially if it's in the interests of certain people to put pressure on RH to behave in a way that benefits these people. It's really convenient to confidently state, with no knowledge of their internal constraints and decisions, that RH screwed up. It's harder to hold off on passing judgment until all the facts are clear.

krylon 3y ago

I was under the impression that CentOS mostly competed with Debian or Ubuntu, with the added benefit that switching from CentOS to RHEL was very easy. RHEL probably competes more with proprietary Unix systems (although they all seem to be fading to oblivion these days), SLES, or Windows. Maybe z/OS on mainframes, but I suspect Linux deployments on those machines are more like "We already have the mainframe, let's buy a couple more CPUs and RAM and put Linux in an extra LPAR or VM instead of buying new servers".