One of the joys of open source is that developers can take software apart and rebuild it in their own image. In this case, a developer community has taken Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, reworked it and released it for free under the GPL as CentOS. But is it a worthwhile alternative to its commercially-available parent? On first inspection, you would struggle to find any real difference between CentOS and RHEL. Both are aimed primarily at (surprise!) the enterprise and they share the same source. Apart from a few tweaks to the line-up, CentOS contains all the free software available with RHEL.

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