Open Letter to Red Hat on CentOS – Damage to Your Brand, and Another Route to Revenue

CentOS, CentOS Stream, and Red Hat Fan

I am writing this from the following perspective:

• a long time Red Hat brand advocate
• a long time user of CentOS
• co-founder and advisor/operator at a 20 year old hosting company that helps end customers use CentOS in production for non-enterprise uses
• founder and advisor/operator at startup on-demand infrastructure provider with a flagship instant on OpenStack private cloud based on CentOS Stream

The final puzzle piece.  In our private cloud business we have been growing to larger and larger customers.  As customers approach “enterprise” spends, they naturally look to offerings like RHEL.  

Last week I was fact gathering so I could talk to our team of OpenStack engineers about using RHEL servers for enterprise level customers.  I wanted to understand licensing and basic costs first before getting too far.  As it turns out, it is pretty hidden like many “enterprise” sales processes like to do even though tech people hate that flow.  But still, as a long time fan of Red Hat, I am excited about getting to work with them directly.  But then I got distracted by a Red Hat announcement.  Yes, that one.

Red Hat Hits Again on CentOS/RHEL Downstream Clones

Red Hat took another swing at RHEL downstream clones. It isn’t clear really what Red Hat is so angry about;

• Is it Oracle repackaging RHEL?  That does seem like it cuts into Red Hat’s current enterprise business model but Oracle does a decent amount of upstream work on the Linux Kernel so that helps RHEL.
• Is it Rocky Linux and something personal against Gregory Kurtzer?  He is the founder of Rocky but also was a co-founder of CentOS before Red Hat bought it.
• Is it AlmaLinux that has ties to CloudLinux and cPanel which both monetize on top of RHEL clones?
• Something not on this list?

It is hard to say, but I will put forward this idea. I don’t think Red Hat truly understands that the vast majority of CentOS users are not like paying  RHEL users and will never be like paying RHEL users. I saw this post from a Red Hatter that is explaining his view on the CentOS to CentOS Stream change.  Good article, check it out.  CentOS Stream makes sense to me and several other points resonated, but as I read it, it reinforced to me that from an insider’s view a free downstream RHEL clone just doesn’t support their sales funnel.  I also read the recent response from Red Hat’s VP of Core Platforms Engineering, Mark McGrath. That also reinforced to me that Red Hat is looking at CentOS users from their Enterprise Software revenue lens.

But… If most CentOS users are nothing like paying RHEL users then why expect them to become paying RHEL users? How about selling them something they want?

Value of CentOS Users and Other RHEL Downstream Clones

So what do they have from my view.  Millions of users of a RHEL derivative that absolutely use it and trust it in production but will almost never graduate to an “Enterprise Use Case”.  So what does that mean then?

In the posts above both mention some expectation of Red Hat’s acquisition of CentOS yielding a key marketing goal of having a percentage of CentOS users convert to RHEL in a predictable funnel.  Quote from the Red Hat VP, Mark, “The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn’t reality.”

I am not sure who might be in this group that has the “generally accepted position” he spoke about, but I am not.  And if you were going to have that happen, it would be a specifically created funnel with an in-depth understanding of the users that would move through that funnel.

Well, I happened to have just gone down that rabbit hole/funnel – but first, the main mission – I hope to get to the right eyes in Red Hat for the following: