Jason Brooks at eWeek writes a useful perspective on Red Hat's approach to RHEL licensing and its implications for CentOS.

I couldn't agree more.  Linux companies should be making it easier to deploy their products, not harder.  When people ask me what distribution they should use for their server, i say Debian (due to its stability and extreme ease of installation and administration) unless they have a significant investment in Red Hat or Novell skills already.

For those who've learned on Red Hat's products, CentOS (or one of the other RHEL source respins) is often the only viable platform, since RHEL simply costs too much.  (I work predominantly with small businesses, schools, non-profit organisations, and home users.)  If Red Hat would simply allow free downloads of RHEL, and do the right thing by the people from the community (especially CentOS) who have worked hard to keep RHEL skills out there in the marketplace for the last few years), they would consolidate their position.  As it is, they are losing market share to the no-cost distros that they won't get back if they run things this way for long enough.

Of course, all this applies to server deployments. &nsbp;On the desktop, Red Hat aren't even in the picture. If you want a stable, functional, completely free desktop, Ubuntu is king.  And if you're looking for a corporate desktop, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 is hard to pass up as a close second.