This is more of a strategic move to make Oracle Linux and the other RHEL copies and CentOS-wannabes less compelling: many enterprises that are evaluating Oracle vs. Red Hat will stick to the single-vendor option, and many enterprises that are evaluating Ubuntu vs. CentOS can finally check both checkboxes for "corporate backed and officially endorsed" and "$0 to get started".
Yes. There are customers like me who are never going to give you $500 per server. sorry. it's just not happening.
But, eh, when I need money, you know what I do? I go work for larger companies, maintaining their servers. You know what I tell them to do? I tell them to go buy RHEL; It's a good product. They really do set things up so you don't have to do a major upgrade for ten years. And for the large companies? the $500 isn't a big deal, and the support really is worth something; they have someone to call if I'm not around.
CentOS was perfect for RedHat, because there is a real disadvantage to CentOS, even without the support problems; there's a delay. Nobody who can afford the $500 a machine is going to use CentOS, but it's there and good enough for those of us who can't.
Oracle changed this situation. Oracle will give you CentOS, for free, and is much faster at the re-compile. Now, I don't use it because I hate Oracle, but using Oracle has been the rational choice for some time now. (And I like RedHat. I mean, as much as you can like a company. Vs. Oracle? I am really rooting for RedHat here.)
My hope here is that RHEL will improve the compile-time of CentOS to where it's as good as Oracle.
They don't strictly have to put all the sources in a conveniently compilable format on FTP servers.
In a way they're already doing that with kernel source; the actual broken-out patches applied to the kernel are only available to customers and they're contractually obliged not to distribute them otherwise their contract will be terminated and they'll lose access to support, software and security updates and the right to run RHEL at all.
That's a pretty novel interpretation of the GPL, and I doubt that it would hold up in court. Reading through the GPLv2 I can't see anything in there that even suggests Red Hat would be within their rights to do that.
It makes it harder to figure out what sources came from RH, and what are vanilla kernel sources, but there's nothing in the GPL that says you have to detail the provenance of every line of source code distributed