Indeed. The lure of CentOS is pretty much that it is RHEL with replaced artwork. And Red Hat benefits a lot from CentOS...
Red Hat sells to businesses, and any business with money to spend on RHEL subscriptions will do so. Management doesn't like free-as-in-beer very much. But they also don't like to see a piling amount of licensing costs on development and testing machines.
Having a paid-for distribution and a free distribution with separate brandings allows RHEL to have a higher subscription cost while not losing customers to the competition because of the added cost of development/testing machines.
I think this is even the reason why Red Hat is much more successful than Novell: the existence of a low-resistance path to the "enterprise" distribution without that meaning less quality or bleeding-edge distributions.
Interesting. You basically made the point I use to describe Microsoft's relationship to software piracy. CentOS allows Red Hat to compete in price with, say, Debian much like pirated copies of Windows allow Microsoft to compete in price with various Linux distros.
Red Hat sells to businesses, and any business with money to spend on RHEL subscriptions will do so. Management doesn't like free-as-in-beer very much. But they also don't like to see a piling amount of licensing costs on development and testing machines.
Having a paid-for distribution and a free distribution with separate brandings allows RHEL to have a higher subscription cost while not losing customers to the competition because of the added cost of development/testing machines.
I think this is even the reason why Red Hat is much more successful than Novell: the existence of a low-resistance path to the "enterprise" distribution without that meaning less quality or bleeding-edge distributions.