It's quite possible, that, being a huge company, they do a lot of bad crap (they are not high on my list), but there are some good people there trying to do good things.
I've met a lot of smart and friendly developers who work for Oracle (or companies acquired by Oracle) so I know for a fact there are many people in that organization which are genuinely good and really smart.
However, it seems to be a culture which promotes aggressive "shark" type personalities into leadership positions - people who, in my experience, have less focus on ethical business practices and more focus on increasing profits, crushing competition, and advancing up the ladder.
It obviously makes for a successful company but it's a not one which I would trust to have my business' best interests at heart.
And in the unlikely event that it were to happen, you could just switch to Scientific Linux, or whatever new RHEL clone would crop up in the wake of the news.
i am not sure why your compassion is so selective. people who work for fucking oracle are misunderstood saints, while the poor sods that put centos together - who have never done anyone any harm - should be thrown to the wolves.
But if I were a sysadmin, would I run CentOS in production? Is CentOS perfect? I'd say no on both counts, and I think there's nothing wrong with saying "There's room for improvement, and we think we've done better."
put it another, more constructive way: wouldn't it be better to help centos rather than try to kill them? why not take that route?
is noticing that i am angry somehow going to make everything work out? when centos folds and oracle decide to "raise margins" me being angry will make centos come back?
because if not, i would suggest worrying a little less about my emotional state and a little more about the future of your operating system.
For many years I was a Debian package maintainer, and Debian got by ok without much corporate support, despite the existence of Redhat.
In other words, your thinking is way too zero-sum. I think there's room for both. Perhaps the competition will make Redhat think about their model some too, improving things for everyone.
CentOS is free, so as long as the sponsors continue to sponsor the work on CentOS and as long as whoever pays for the servers &c continues to do so, the project can continue.
Scientific Linux and PUIAS exist for other reasons than commercial server provisioning and those reasons will probably stay around.
The CentOS and Scientific Linux forums contain useful information, the mailing lists contain more technical information. Oracle won't to my knowledge be providing self-help forums or other community features as they wish to package support as a product. I can imagine Oracle Linux users who do not require support dropping into, posting to and contributing to the CentOS and SciLi forums.
How will CentOS (or another clone) be impacted to the point of extinction by Oracle Linux? Am I being dense here?