Interesting - I did the exact opposite. Red Hat have a habit of removing packages that compete with their commercial offerings, which forces you to either compile from source or to install from other repositories - for example, they removed Apache ActiveMQ because they offer JBoss AMQ.

This starts to become annoying because all of a sudden you have multiple update processes to keep everything up-to-date, whereas previously, you had one. After being bitten by this at least twice, I shifted everything to Ubuntu.