I guess what I'm asking, why would Microsoft want this person? (No offence intended to anyone involved)
Yes, it's RHEL with the serial numbers filed off.
> isn't Oracle Linux mostly just an excuse to drain Oracle users for OS license money
It's:
1/ revenge on Red Hat for buying JBoss when Larry wanted it.
2/ part of Oracle's vertical integration story.
Oracle Linux sales reps will tell you Oracle DB isn't fully supported on RHEL (i.e. they reserve the right to force you to reproduce production support problems on a rebuilt platform) and Oracle have been trailing certification on the last couple of releases of the DB on RHEL vs. OEL.
I imagine the end game Oracle are hoping for is undercutting Red Hat until they can run a hostile takeover, then shut down either the JBoss or WebLogic product lines, and generally do unto Linux what they've been doing to MySQL.
- Oracle Linux is a base copy of Redhat plus additional things to integrate better with Oracle products, it was a bad move against Redhat, but beneficial for Oracle purposes.
- Ksplice: most of people misunderstood the real work of it. Don't blame Oracle for acquire it, somebody sell it and it was always a private technology meaning 'patents involved'. Note that the real work happens when making "the patches" and making sure they are backward compatible, including different architectures. So the real purpose was to provide a service that nobody could provide before. note: As of today you can use Ksplice for free in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.
- Why Microsoft would want Wim ?, In my opinion because they need someone who had successfully built Linux into a Line of Business, from a business perspective it sounds a good deal. As of today I don't think Oracle truly supports Open Source, not sure what are the plans for Wim on that area at Microsoft.
Considering their frankly disgusting actions with OpenSolaris, they actively hate free software. In fact, they invented a new word: re-proprietrisation.
For instance, UEK R4 is based on the 4.1.12 Linux kernel. RHEL 7 ships with 3.10.0.
It still makes me nauseous to deal with Oracle, but providing support for a relatively modern kernel release is a step in the right direction. Now if they could shorten RHEL's time between major releases and get them out on a consistent timeframe, that would be another big step in the right direction. Of course then you're practically shipping Ubuntu.