Originally Posted By: BearZDefect
Thank you for clarifying that. I thought that Mint is in the same market as Ubuntu desktop for consumers, people who do not buy support contracts or business cloud services.
Well, they kind of are; but "people who do not buy support contracts or business cloud services" aren't much of a market! Mint is someone's hobby that got out of control and does not challenge Canonical's revenue in any way.
Ubuntu has always offered their OS for free ("free" as in both "no charge" and as in "freedom" or "free to modify and re-distribute") so there are dozens of Ubuntu derivatives out there. Some of these are endorsed by Canonical (Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE, etc.) and receive some resources from Canonical. Of all the others, Mint is the only one to have gotten so popular that there is even a discussion about them "being in the same market". Canonical has always been extremely encouraging to any person or party that would like to create a derivative distro. I currently use
this tool to create what might technically be a derivative (I keep all of the branding; I just customize the install to include codecs, extra tools, etc.) for use installing for friends, family and neighbours. If I re-branded my derivative and my new distro's user base went from approximately a dozen to a few million then I'd be like Mint!
They're all free in every sense of the word; and "sharing" is a lot more important in the world of free software than "competing" as the whole point of F/LOSS is to give and share, not to exploit for self-serving purposes. I think at some point, though, Canonical, while being extremely friendly in allowing derivatives to use their servers to serve packages, found Mint's volume of bandwidth a little more than inconvenient. To this day, though, Mint's main releases are all based directly on Ubuntu's LTS releases and they track the Ubuntu repositories directly.
Originally Posted By: BearZDefect
RedHat vs CentOS seemed different to me. CentOS was used extensively by large web hosting companies, in other words, by businesses from whom RedHat wanted to draw income.
Yes, this is well-observed. I think Red Hat may have seen some value, though, in having a hand in improving - or at least standardizing the quality of - a derivative that was being used by a *lot* of businesses that had determined they did not need Red Hat's support contracts.
Red Hat's OS is free as well. You cannot install the compiled binaries they've made without first purchasing a support contract but you are free to compile your own OS from their source code, given you remove their branding. This is what CentOS and Scientific Linux have done.