Making millions on DB software only withhold RedHat the pocket change they absolutely deserve is absolutely pathetic. Even with the helpful support and hand holding of then co-workers, I found that Oracle's unbreakable linux is a close to useless rip off, littered with subtle gotchas, pitfalls and please-insert-yet-another-license-key-here.
Installing, tuning and maintaining an OS professionally on enterprise hardware to run enterprise software is the bread and butter of RedHat. I never understood why they insisted pushing their own mediocre engineers instead, and did not want to pony up the (relatively) modest cost of reselling the license.
> I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.
I guess so. It still mystifies me why they haven't gone out of business wearing the emperors cloths.
Their business model allowed for greater ease to actually download and run unregistered/unlicensed copies, but higher costs with per-core licensing and clauses which required (i.e.) the per-core licensed OS plus the per-core licensed database if you wanted to use the latter.
It was both easier to run for free and way more expensive to run in legal compliance.