[davidmr]

I'm trying very hard to be as neutral as possible (as opposed to "Oracle bad. Raaaaar!"), but I've been part of the HPC community for a long time, and Oracle has done their best to tell us that we don't matter at all to them (Grid Engine, Lustre, etc.). I understand that the margins on HPC aren't great, so I don't necessarily fault them, but it leaves a very bad taste. That's just one community of many who feel like they've been wronged by Oracle.

You say that they've produced something useful; can you say a little more about what Oracle has specifically produced with respect to Oracle Linux? My strong impression is that they've taken 99.9% Red Hat's hard work, dumped their own 0.1% on top (OCFS2, some IB enhancements, etc.), slapped a big price tag on it and then exclaim, "look what we made!"

Removing that price tag doesn't change much. I'm open to being reasoned with, though, so please tell me why I'm wrong.

[wdaher]

There's a ton to talk about in the "Why Oracle Linux and not RHEL" department, but I'm not trying to sell you anything, so I want to set that aside for now. (I have to say, though, even the "big price tag" is significantly smaller than RHEL's).

Instead, I want to look at the following case: you're a sysadmin running CentOS. You don't pay anyone for support, and you have no intention of ever doing so.

There, I think the benefits are, in brief, the things you're able to achieve when you have large-scale resources: timely releases and better QA, while maintaining 100% RHEL compatibility. Basically "what you love about CentOS", minus "what you hate about CentOS".

But yes, it comes from Oracle :)

[cinch]

I dont get why your QA is better than red hats. They have a much longer experience with their product.

[praxulus]

It's cheaper.

[chris_wot]

Not following. Their QA is cheaper so it must be better?

[praxulus]

Assuming their QA is good enough for most customers, being cheaper is a pretty obvious benefit.