Based on your provided links the apples to apples comparison for RHEL Server Standard Support ($799) would be the Oracle Basic Support ($499)
Also, considering that OEL is downstream from RHEL how sustainable do we really think it would be for RHEL to downstream from OEL? How long would OEL invest and maintain in OS components that don’t directly benefit their specific offerings? Is there evidence to suggest there is any truth behind that offer? In my years of following the Linux ecosystem Oracle’s niche seems to have largely evolved around performance optimizations that solve specific problems they experience with other products or feature enhancements to facilitate new developments within their product ecosystem (which is still great for the community!) but what I have not seen is general purpose stewardship of the ecosystem of packages outside the kernel. I have no doubts they have made contributions of that nature but that has certainly not been a constant in what I have personally observed thus far. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I genuinely don’t believe Oracle would truly take on that responsibility nor do I believe that they would be anywhere near as effective as Red Hat at executing it
Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts and severely undercutting RHEL costs (since Red Hat incurs significantly more development burden and costs) and using it as a launch pad to embed myriad other Oracle products within the customer ecosystem. Other products that conveniently aren’t grounded in their supposed open source ideals.
Yeah Red Hat does share all the code for customers who purchase binaries and they are not imposing further restrictions on recipients of those binaries with their EULA. If the EULA is violated Red Hat is simply exercising their rights to not distribute future binaries and source thus not violating the GPL clause you mention
Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?
Isn’t this kind of what the RHEL clones were doing? Taking a snapshot of RHEL and then repackaging it, and in the case of Rocky Linux selling support. All without actually making any contributions back to the community. Almalinux actually contributes patches so I feel they will end up coming to an agreement with Red Hat but the likes of Rocky Linux seemed to be largely exploitive. Red Hat seems to be saying “hey you can have the code but we aren’t going to make the distribution for you. Here is a link to Stream feel free to make your own distribution”