I don't think many people who want to use something stable like CentOS, but don't want to pay for a RHEL support contract would want to pay Oracle for RHEL-but-with-Oracle-sprinkles-on-top
Put another way, if you jump ship from CentOS because IBM caused Red Hat to change it into a funnel to pay them money, if you landed on Oracle, you might be setting yourself up to do it all over again fairly soon.
You're underselling it: Oracle grab money in a way that I would describe as "aplomb ruthlessness". They've managed to fuck no less than 3 orgs I've worked for.
If they ask you for a license count or how many cores are in use, ignore them. Larry Ellison doesn't need another boat.
"Unlike many other commercial Linux distributions, Oracle Linux is easy to download and completely free to use, distribute, and update. Oracle Linux is available under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). Support contracts are available from Oracle. "
Writing like this makes me very wary of putting Oracle Linux anywhere near my employer's systems
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2992597/law-firm-warns...
https://blog.dbwatch.com/how-to-avoid-oracles-licensing-trap...
Then there's the famous lawn mover quote from Bryan Cantrill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
Been burned by them before. Not at liberty to give details, but the outcome is that I never choose Oracle for anything for the rest of my career. Even if it would save time and money.
Community based sounds better to me.
> But if you're here, you're a CentOS user. Which means that you don't pay for a distribution at all, for at least some of your systems. So even if we made the best paid distribution in the world (and we think we do), we can't actually get it to you... or can we?