The guy you're replying to has implied he works for Oracle and helped bring this to fruition. Instead of asking what the advantage they see is or diving into it, you've accused him of lying and being a part of an evil organization.
Oracle's a business--they make good products that many businesses rely on. While they've done some stuff that this crowd greatly disproves of (see: Java copyright/patents lawsuits), their motivation for doing this could be as simple as keeping the brand's security image in place.
I just want you to know that you had a good opportunity here, and you wasted it.
The "guy you're replying to" is Waseem Daher, who was COO and co-founder of KSplice, a startup acquired by Oracle. KSplice provides a mechanism for streaming updates to Linux Kernel and used to support CentOS, Ubuntu and Fedora. After Oracle acquired KSplice, they discontinued support for CentOS while continuing to support the other distros. Oracle also no longer makes available the formerly GPLed code of KSplice.
We didn't discontinue support for CentOS; our legacy customers can continue to get access to Ksplice for all the distros we used to support. We did stop accepting new customers for anything other than Oracle Linux, though.
The bottom line is that CentOS is now a second-class citizen with regard to support from KSplice, compared to Ubuntu and Fedora. See the KSplice download page at http://www.ksplice.com/uptrack/download in which CentOS is missing.
Regarding the source code, yes the original code was GPLed is still available. But are you saying that Oracle/KSplice will continue to make available ongoing versions of KSplice?
The link you provided is to a source tarball that was mostly last updated in August 2009, except for a small change in July 2011 (removal of zlib detection). Therefore, either the KSplice code is not being maintained at all, or there are ongoing updates to it that will no longer be released in source form.
Sounds like the classic bait and switch. Down the road there surely will be more interesting features (virtualization comes to mind) that can unfortunately not be supported in the free version of Oracle linux. But hey, special deal, just $999/yr and you won't have to migrate to a different distro for that one feature!
Plus included with the price you get our awesome support-plan which you never call, but when you do it will only take weeks before they return a canned response designed to make you buy more products instead of actually solving your problem!
Personally I don't regret sticking with deb-based distros. They have problems of their own, but at least none of this extortion-bullshit.
As long as we're noticing how you guys sold out, I'd like to bring up the Ksplice blog.
It used to have some really interesting stuff on there, but after the move to Oracle, the interesting posts disappeared.
I'm talking specifically about 'Coffee shop internet access'. Man that was a cool post and it taught my brother and I a LOT. Then it disappeared, along with most mirrors of it. I was able to find one left, here:
http://www.getoto.net/noise/2011/01/18/coffee-shop-internet-...
after around a full 60 minutes of searching-- and it doesn't have the images from the original.
I emailed you guys, and J was kind enough to send me the text of the post, but again no images. She said she hoped the coffee shop post would make it to the oracle blog, but this was about 6 months ago so I don't think that'll happen. Anyway, I hope you're able to do good at Oracle, and I hope that you're still trying to, and I hope that you don't get taken advantage of.
Yeah, getting these posts back up has largely been a casualty of our lack of resources, not any sort of coordinated malicious plot against them. But we're glad you like 'em! (and I think your comment was the little bit of kick we needed to just go and bring it back.)
Maybe so, but if I was Oracle I would take this as great feedback. My guess is that the majority of people running CentOS have a very similar attitude, so they should understand that this will be the reaction, whether it is fair or not.
It is up to Oracle to figure out how to build the required trust to market this, not up to consumers to accept it given Oracle's history. Millions of people are missing billions of opportunities every day (and you're probably one of them!) but you don't blame them for it, you figure out how to market a product more effectively instead.
Oracle's a business--they make good products that many businesses rely on. While they've done some stuff that this crowd greatly disproves of (see: Java copyright/patents lawsuits), their motivation for doing this could be as simple as keeping the brand's security image in place.
I just want you to know that you had a good opportunity here, and you wasted it.