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In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux[1]. It was sold in boxes at stores such as CompUSA (remember?) but was also available for free download from Red Hat.

In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux[1]. It was sold in boxes at stores such as CompUSA (remember?) but was also available for free download from Red Hat. Then, Red Hat decided they could make more money by spinning off Red Hat Linux into a separate enterprise-only product called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which they declined to make available for free in a ready-to-install binary form. Fedora[2] was also spun off at this time, as the free successor to Red Hat Linux that was supposed to be only suitable for home users. Fedora development was/is sponsored by Red Hat but they did not offer end-user support, in contrast to RHEL. Meanwhile, there was demand for a free version of RHEL. Since it was built with GPL software, Red Hat was obligated to make it available in source form, but their trademark policy prohibited anyone else from using the Red Hat name. Therefore, a group of volunteers took RHEL, removed Red Hat trademarks, and called it CentOS. To avoid confusion, CentOS explained the origins of the distribution on their web site. For their efforts, they were threatened by Red Hat's legal department and forced to remove all mentions of Red Hat and even links to Red Hat's web site from the CentOS web site. CentOS complied and began referring to its Red Hat derivations using the euphemism PNAELV[3]. Now, Red Hat has again decided they would benefit from being more directly involved in providing an open-source, freely-available enterprise Linux distribution. We've come full circle. (Flippant depiction aside, I intend no antagonism, but merely find the history of these projects interesting.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux [2]: https://fedoraproject.org/en/about-fedora https://fedoraproject.org/en/about-fedora [3]: http://www.pnaelv.net http://www.pnaelv.net

codezero 13y ago
I wonder if they are also doing this so they can get an idea of who the user base of CentOS is and also try to convert them to paying customers.
- pilom 13y ago
  My guess is they are feeling the hit from Oracle Linux's business model and wanted the flexibility to compete directly. Oracle Linux's distribution model is that you can take CentOS, change a couple repositories and make it Oracle Linux. Then if you want support, you can pay for it. With Red Hat, RHEL and CentOS before today were separate products with separate release schedules and separate userbases. This move gives Red Hat the opportunity to act more like Oracle Linux if they choose to.
  - codezero 13y ago
    Oh, wow, I didn't even know that. This sounds much more likely. Thanks!
  - justincormack 13y ago
    Surely no one uses Oracle Linux unless they are running Oracle?
    - bmelton 13y ago
      It' almost certainly designed to take advantage of enterprise customers that are already paying Oracle support dollars in some fashion or other, with the slightly advantageous notion of being able to collapse another support provider.
justinmk 13y ago
Red Hat is one of the most prolific single-entity contributors to open source in the history of open source. I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation that should be the target of said FOSS people's flung shit. By the way, what did Firefox do to live down its IceWeasel[1] infamy? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS. Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that Mozilla, the trademark owner, hadn't officially sanctioned. They began to actively prosecute those cases because some people were modifying the Firefox source to contain malicious code and calling it "Firefox", misappropriating Mozilla's trademark. Because Debian issues a version of Firefox that contains unofficial patches, they cannot legally call their distribution "Firefox", since Mozilla hasn't officially blessed that exact codebase. tl;dr Red Hat was trying to make money from users, and Mozilla wasn't Disclaimer: I personally fully support making money from users and reject freedom 2 as a true fundamental of "free-as-in-freedom software". I'm just explaining why some people in FOSS dislike Red Hat, as it pertains to the CentOS backstory, and why nobody cares about Mozilla's brief trademark dispute with Debian.
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    "Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market " Nothing would make Red Hat happier than having every hacker under the sun using Red Hat - what they were attempting to do was keep the enterprise customers, who were currently paying $1000+/CPU (or so) go with a free alternative and kill their company. Simply removing three things allowed them to do that: (1) No RHN/Up2Date available for Centos, (2) No Support, (3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks. Centos had everything else.
stock_toaster 13y ago
> they were threatened by Red Hat's legal department and forced to remove all mentions of Red Hat and even links to Red Hat's web site from the CentOS web site. Doesn't trademark require you to enforce your trademark (or you lose it)? Also, Oracle did/does the same thing as CentOS, and sells support for it. There is also ScientificLinux too.
hacman 13y ago
Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers. What they have done is make the sources available to everyone on the Internet for free [1]. So CentOS would have to pay for RHEL were it not for Red Hat's openness. Probably not a big deal. However, Red Hat is under no obligation to make its non-GPL packages (e.g., python, ruby, apache, postgresql, ssh, etc.) available to anyone in source form, including their customers. These, too, are available free of charge to the general public. Finally, Red Hat is under no obligation to make any of the source of their own internally-developed projects (e.g., package management, OS installer, and all of the other projects that differentiate the distribution from a software perspective) available under an open source license, but they do (admittedly, this was not always the case). Finally, Red Hat employs many developers who work full time on critical projects (kernel, gcc, gnome, etc.). They are pretty model open source citizens whose business model is not to use open source as a gateway to their own proprietary products like IBM and Oracle. If they wanted to shut down CentOS, it would be very easy to stop distributing the source of their own projects and of permissive license packages. Hopefully sponsoring CentOS is not just a play to exert influence on the project and retard its progress, but I am willing to give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt here. [1] http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/...
- craigching 13y ago
  > Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers. That is true, but the GPL allows their customers to freely distribute the GPL source they receive. Not saying Red Hat doesn't help or isn't doing good here, but it's not quite as altruistic as you make it out to be. I thank the GPL for that. Note that I'm a huge fan of Red Hat and preferred their distribution since the RH 4 days, I don't want to denigrate Red Hat in any way. Also a huge fan of CentOS as well.
dorfsmay 13y ago
I believe RedHat would get a lot more followers, and a lot more support money if they did two things: - have support contracts that make sense, and trust their customers. Let their customers choose which server they want to put under contract etc... - have more software in their default repo (like, I don't know... Ubuntu) They managed to corner the market for pay-for software (to a certain extent, Suse has managed to capture a piece of that market), but they make support and lack of standard software so bad, that people go to extreme length tu run on CentOS and ScientifiLinux, and have a single server running Ubuntu.
- simtel20 13y ago
  Every time a market collapse is hanging over the finance world, they know their customers will do what a prior employer does/did: put support on 1 of 1000 servers. It's sad, but this wasn't at a .com rev3 company, this was an old-school hedge fund with billions under management. IT support is just something that gets neglected if there isn't a contract that is enforceable. Clearly the company could afford a thousand systems worth of support, and could make it worth the money (autofs bugs galore!). There is a something missing in making the social contract of open source pay for the people needed to maintain open source.
  - dorfsmay 13y ago
    People do that today. I know of a few companies which tried to pay for 24 hour support for prod servers, email for QA servers and no support for dev servers, and RedHat insisted on making them pay for anything running RedHat, all or nothing... Companies switched to CentOS and SL, and bought contract for one RedHat server.
Confusion 13y ago
I think RH recognized that * CentOS has significant market share * people sometimes want to switch from CentOS to RH, but not vice versa (natural evolution in growing companies) Thus they will cooperate with CentOS, with the end result that switching from CentOS to RH will become easier.

codezero 13y ago

I wonder if they are also doing this so they can get an idea of who the user base of CentOS is and also try to convert them to paying customers.

pilom 13y ago
My guess is they are feeling the hit from Oracle Linux's business model and wanted the flexibility to compete directly. Oracle Linux's distribution model is that you can take CentOS, change a couple repositories and make it Oracle Linux. Then if you want support, you can pay for it. With Red Hat, RHEL and CentOS before today were separate products with separate release schedules and separate userbases. This move gives Red Hat the opportunity to act more like Oracle Linux if they choose to.
- codezero 13y ago
  Oh, wow, I didn't even know that. This sounds much more likely. Thanks!
- justincormack 13y ago
  Surely no one uses Oracle Linux unless they are running Oracle?
  - bmelton 13y ago
    It' almost certainly designed to take advantage of enterprise customers that are already paying Oracle support dollars in some fashion or other, with the slightly advantageous notion of being able to collapse another support provider.

justinmk 13y ago

Red Hat is one of the most prolific single-entity contributors to open source in the history of open source. I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation that should be the target of said FOSS people's flung shit. By the way, what did Firefox do to live down its IceWeasel[1] infamy? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

cookiecaper 13y ago
The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS. Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that Mozilla, the trademark owner, hadn't officially sanctioned. They began to actively prosecute those cases because some people were modifying the Firefox source to contain malicious code and calling it "Firefox", misappropriating Mozilla's trademark. Because Debian issues a version of Firefox that contains unofficial patches, they cannot legally call their distribution "Firefox", since Mozilla hasn't officially blessed that exact codebase. tl;dr Red Hat was trying to make money from users, and Mozilla wasn't Disclaimer: I personally fully support making money from users and reject freedom 2 as a true fundamental of "free-as-in-freedom software". I'm just explaining why some people in FOSS dislike Red Hat, as it pertains to the CentOS backstory, and why nobody cares about Mozilla's brief trademark dispute with Debian.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  "Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market " Nothing would make Red Hat happier than having every hacker under the sun using Red Hat - what they were attempting to do was keep the enterprise customers, who were currently paying $1000+/CPU (or so) go with a free alternative and kill their company. Simply removing three things allowed them to do that: (1) No RHN/Up2Date available for Centos, (2) No Support, (3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks. Centos had everything else.

stock_toaster 13y ago

> they were threatened by Red Hat's legal department and forced to remove all mentions of Red Hat and even links to Red Hat's web site from the CentOS web site. Doesn't trademark require you to enforce your trademark (or you lose it)? Also, Oracle did/does the same thing as CentOS, and sells support for it. There is also ScientificLinux too.

hacman 13y ago

Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers. What they have done is make the sources available to everyone on the Internet for free [1]. So CentOS would have to pay for RHEL were it not for Red Hat's openness. Probably not a big deal. However, Red Hat is under no obligation to make its non-GPL packages (e.g., python, ruby, apache, postgresql, ssh, etc.) available to anyone in source form, including their customers. These, too, are available free of charge to the general public. Finally, Red Hat is under no obligation to make any of the source of their own internally-developed projects (e.g., package management, OS installer, and all of the other projects that differentiate the distribution from a software perspective) available under an open source license, but they do (admittedly, this was not always the case). Finally, Red Hat employs many developers who work full time on critical projects (kernel, gcc, gnome, etc.). They are pretty model open source citizens whose business model is not to use open source as a gateway to their own proprietary products like IBM and Oracle. If they wanted to shut down CentOS, it would be very easy to stop distributing the source of their own projects and of permissive license packages. Hopefully sponsoring CentOS is not just a play to exert influence on the project and retard its progress, but I am willing to give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt here. [1] http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/...

craigching 13y ago
> Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers. That is true, but the GPL allows their customers to freely distribute the GPL source they receive. Not saying Red Hat doesn't help or isn't doing good here, but it's not quite as altruistic as you make it out to be. I thank the GPL for that. Note that I'm a huge fan of Red Hat and preferred their distribution since the RH 4 days, I don't want to denigrate Red Hat in any way. Also a huge fan of CentOS as well.

dorfsmay 13y ago

I believe RedHat would get a lot more followers, and a lot more support money if they did two things: - have support contracts that make sense, and trust their customers. Let their customers choose which server they want to put under contract etc... - have more software in their default repo (like, I don't know... Ubuntu) They managed to corner the market for pay-for software (to a certain extent, Suse has managed to capture a piece of that market), but they make support and lack of standard software so bad, that people go to extreme length tu run on CentOS and ScientifiLinux, and have a single server running Ubuntu.

simtel20 13y ago
Every time a market collapse is hanging over the finance world, they know their customers will do what a prior employer does/did: put support on 1 of 1000 servers. It's sad, but this wasn't at a .com rev3 company, this was an old-school hedge fund with billions under management. IT support is just something that gets neglected if there isn't a contract that is enforceable. Clearly the company could afford a thousand systems worth of support, and could make it worth the money (autofs bugs galore!). There is a something missing in making the social contract of open source pay for the people needed to maintain open source.
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  People do that today. I know of a few companies which tried to pay for 24 hour support for prod servers, email for QA servers and no support for dev servers, and RedHat insisted on making them pay for anything running RedHat, all or nothing... Companies switched to CentOS and SL, and bought contract for one RedHat server.

Confusion 13y ago

I think RH recognized that * CentOS has significant market share * people sometimes want to switch from CentOS to RH, but not vice versa (natural evolution in growing companies) Thus they will cooperate with CentOS, with the end result that switching from CentOS to RH will become easier.