Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

I've run 200+ server environments on centos4, a 40+ server cluster on centos5, and now run a 50+ server cluster on rhel6. I'm pretty much dead on their target audience here.

This seems almost mean. Its a billion dollar company calling out a volunteer group of a couple of guys for being slower than them.

Part of the reason I switched to rhel was exactly this graph, I didn't have a lot of faith in centos as a going concern given the delays on 6. But also, its clearly not easy for a reason. There is a lot of work to be done, and the farther you trace your way up the rhel/epel/fedora tree the more you realize this is a community providing an insane amount of value and deserves to be funded.

So if Oracle is going to sell me on using and/or paying for their distro, being faster than a handful of volunteers isn't gonna do it. Going toe-to-toe with redhat on funding, contributing, producing and supporting open source software such that I want to fund you is what'll do it.

Have they improved dtrace since this released abortion: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2011/10/10/oel-this-is-not-dtrac...

update: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2012/02/23/dtrace-oel-update/

(Disclaimer: I had a hand in a lot of this)

That's not quite the intent. Look, here's the deal: I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the presence of corporate interests actually messes stuff up.

But this really is one case where you want the oomph of bilion-dollar company making sure that you get your security updates in time.

No one else is providing that. Oracle happens to be doing so, and we're making it available to you for free, so why shouldn't you benefit from that? (And seriously, I get that you're not paying for CentOS, and I'm not interested in getting you to pay for Oracle Linux either.)

Just as someone ripping you off will go to lengths to explain that they aren't ripping you off.