December 3, 2009, 10:38 am
Red Hat is the number one Linux company on the planet by a wide margin. Their flagship distribution, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), is great, and they have excellent technical support. That hasn’t stopped other companies from trying to ride on their coattails, and lately more businesses are adopting Red Hat’s Linux code base and offering support for it.
Why would anyone want to do this? After all, Red Hat support doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg. The first developers who used Red Hat Linux as the foundation for their own distributions — CentOS, StartCom and White Box Enterprise Linux — created distributions for people who were richer in Linux expertise than they were in money. Thus, historically, RHEL clone users tend to be old Linux pros who didn’t need much in the way of Red Hat handholding.
