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.