Red Hat started out making their money selling the software in a shrink wrapped box with manuals. However, that business model became progressively obsolete with the growth of the Internet and CD burners. They also found that folks like Mandrake would just take their work and undercut them on publishing deals (like Macmillian - they didn't even bother to remove some of the Red Hat branding).<br>
<br>Red Hat gradually moved their business from one of selling CDs to one of selling support. However, they found they were spending an inordinate amount of time and money supporting a desktop OS that wasn't generating very much support revenue. They decided to create an enterprise OS called RHEL that they would extensively support and market to companies, and create a desktop community OS project called Fedora.<br>
<br>Red Hat didn't do a good job with the Fedora spin-off, and most of that had to do with the way they announced it - it seemed to the community that Fedora was being abandoned by Red Hat. In reality it wasn't true, and by Fedora 3 the distribution really had taken off. Fedora's going very strong right now, and is innovating.<br>
<br>Jeffrey.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:04 PM, Ty Unes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:riverty@kc.rr.com">riverty@kc.rr.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I may be incorrect on this but, I have always thought that RedHat started their business to sell support for Linux, not necessarily their version of Linux. RedHat started with only one distribution, freely downloadable, and built their business on selling "official support" for that distribution.<br>
<br>
At the time, I was running Slackware servers and will admit that I didn't really follow the reasoning behind Redhat's split into Fedora and RHEL. My guess was, without really following along, that RedHat decided to garner the cool system administration tools that made their distribution "enterprise ready" for themselves, and release and support Fedora freely onward.<br>
<br>
If this is true, then I don't see why CentOS is in the wrong and/or hurting RHEL. Cent is not selling support for their distribution. Although, I've been to their website and read a bit. It IS kinda quirky how they refer to RedHat as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor." Almost like they feel like they are stealing.<div>
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