I see this as a good thing. Seems to me that we are basically getting back RedHat releases pre-RHEL. Fedora is great for the desktop, but I really like "Enterprise Linux" on the server side. I basically abandoned RedHat after the RHEL/Fedora split. Went to Gentoo (to unstable at the time) for a bit, Ubuntu, then CentOS during the late 4.x releases. I will pretty much stick with CentOS from here on out, why? Well enterprise customers who what support can get it, people who don't can easily use it, and those that don't want to pay now but know they will need to later will have an easy path forward. And its nice to have a major release that will remain stable and patched for a 7 year haul. Some folks seem to be concerned like this is a bad thing, RedHat has been a model citizen for open source. The amount of work they do in backporting fixes for people who need to remain on a version for whatever reason is huge. On top of the fact that they make most (all?) of their own software freely available as well. There is really no advantage for them to do anything to CentOS other than keep it doing what its doing, but faster.
To those wondering, I think that Red Hat doesn't make that much money from SELLING RHEL. It's the support, certifications and those things that are making Red Hat's budget. So CentOS and RHEL aren't really competing products. But Red Hat can now offer support even to CentOS customers.<p>(I'm Red Hat employee.)
I don't see why so many people think this deal is such a head scratcher. Red Hat is shifting away from pure support to a suite of cloud services. People are more likely to choose them if they are already using a Red Hat platform. This is especially useful if you're obliged to maintain a free version.<p>The moment you enter the blade business, you stop caring if someone is giving away your razors.
I wonder what this is going to do to the Centos-Xen[1] project?<p>[1]<a href="http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/06/20/welcome-to-the-xen4centos6-project-first-release/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/06/20/welcome-to-the-xen4...</a>
On one hand, this might actually improve the state of CentOS. But on the other hand, it's a bit of a conflict of interest for Red Hat to be maintaining the free (as in freedom) version. The real question is, how compatible is the freemium (as in beer) business model with open-source interests?