Many recommends CentOS 7 because it is open source and provide same features as red hat 7 and you can not use the red hat product without license. So what does open source mean? Is Cent OS same as Redhat?
I keep seeing people say sorta the same you do here. Let's get a few things straight - if Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) wasn't open source, CentOS would not exist - it would be illegal to recompile from the RHEL source code. OEL and Scientific Linux wouldn't exist, and there's a good chance Fedora wouldn't either or at least not in the form it exists today. That's just the beginning. You seem to confuse open source with free - that's not the case. "Free as in Beer" is what CentOS is. "Free as in Liberty" is what RHEL is. Where CentOS is Gratis - RHEL is commercially supported.
That leads to your comment about license. CentOS has a license too - the exact SAME license as RHEL. GPLv3 governs both of them. The license defines things like ownership. You do not own CentOS - the developers do. It's even copy-righted! You cannot just make a copy of CentOS and remove the copy-right notes and proclaim it's your code. That would be breaking the LICENSE that gives you the right to copy and modify the code as much as you want. All Open Source is governed by Licenses - you should read up on your history and what Richard Stallman did to create the open source movement. So Red Hat does not sell licenses. Oracle does - IBM does - Microsoft does - but not Red Hat. Red Hat is 100% open source, and has probably open sourced more proprietary code than any other commercial entity has out there. oVirt (KVM), SELinux, ManageIQ to just mention a few of the many initially were closed sourced projects. Projects that anyone can download, compile and use - they even exist ready to install from EPEL.
Red Hat sells subscriptions. Like subscribing to a magazine. If you have subscriptions you get access to services that are important to enterprises - such as timely updates, support, expert knowledge bases just to begin the long list of things. Once your subscription expires, you can keep everything you have - try that with Oracle or IBM!
As to RHEL and CentOS being the same, it depends on what you mean by "the same". Binary they are far from the same. Patches and distribution is not the same and CentOs doesn't certify or guarantee that anything will work (Red Hat does for RHEL).
CentOS is a great distribution - done by a very few people that everyone get mad at when they dare to have a private life outside CentOS. It provides a great platform to learn from and experiment on and it follows the same structure that RHEL does so things look very similar to RHEL. If you want to learn how to create an FTP server, Web Server etc. then CentOS is a great platform to do that on.
However, if you're trying to build a business and you need the FTP server to make your money, CentOS is a bad platform to bet on. If things go bad, you really have nowhere to go - you have to be the expert in everything - and face it, nobody is an expert in everything. That's what RHEL gives you - a professional backing for doing things right the first time, and if things go bad you have a group of very smart professionals to help you out. So instead of losing your business you can be successful and make a lot of money.
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