"This month’s Linux Format Magazine came with CentOS 5.2 on the disc. CentOS, in case you don’t know, is a community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (RHEL) Again, in the unlikely case you don’t know - Red Hat is required to supply the source code to all GPL code it uses in RHEL. What they don’t have to do is supply the Source RPMs which make it extremely easy for a distro like CentOS to exist. They can take the SRPMs and just remove the Red Hat artwork/logos and repackage it off as their own. The GPL allows this. Why in the world would Red Hat do this? They are, in a way, helping for a gratis version of their distro to exist and take away money that might otherwise go to them.

Well, here’s my take on it - which could be completely wrong. If a company out there wants to have a gratis distro, there are plenty from which to make its pick. It could use Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Gentoo, Slackware…the list goes on. So the fact that there are many gratis Linux distros out there means that they aren’t just competing against gratis. But, you might argue, those distros are not RHEL so they don’t really compete. Ok, then the company could use Fedora because Fedora is upstream for RHEL. So Fedora is what RHEL will look like in a future release. But Fedora tends to be bleeding edge and is only supported for 18 months. The current version of Red Hat is supported until 2014! So what is their reason making things easy for CentOS?"