From the 'CentOS vs. Oracle Linux' files:

Red Hat makes its money from selling support subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Mostly the same bits are available entirely for free by way of the community led CentOS project that clones RHEL.

I recently chatted with Red Hat CEO about CentOS and the long story short is he's good with CentOS.

Having CentOS out there is a good thing. It broadens our community. There are people that don't need the things that we have in subscription and it's great that there is an offering build off the same code base.

Whitehurst added that Red Hat works with CentOS and have made changes to the way code is released to make sure it doesn't impede the CentOS flow.

That said, Whitehurst is still interested in selling RHEL to those CentOS users that might need it.

Now on the other side of the coin is Oracle. Oracle claims that it kinda/sorta is doing the same thing, taking the same bits and then making them available. But in Whitehurst's view, Oracle is not the same league as CentOS or RHEL for that matter.

Whitehurst said that he doesn't see a lot of competitive bids with Oracle Linux. Furthermore most the RHEL customers that once left for Oracle have now returned since Oracle Linux isn't exactly the same.

It's really an interesting dichotomy.

Check out the full video from my interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.