I never really understood why Oracle forked RH into their own distro, but from this now I can see - it was to essentially demonstrate the cessation of their support of RedHat (given that LE was claiming in the FT piece that Oracle was supporting/helping RedHat at the time) by giving them a little kick in nuts.

I think the customers that bought up Oracle Linux were the kind of dumb sheep customers who'll buy anything a vendor pushes them (yes, there are many of those out there).

Informed customers not happy with RHEL licensing and support simply swap out to CentOS.

It's an interesting examination of customer behavior in fact.