CentOS support, so we don't impact RH's business. Oracle on the other hand DOES offer paid support, which impacts RH's business, and I don't see any substantive attempts by oracle to give anything back to the community at large.
Just to be fair to Oracle on this count, they do give to the community:
- Free OS: OEL - Free databases (no cost): Oracle XE - Free cluster/parallel filesystems: OCFS2 - And quite a bit more... all available at oss.oracle.com
In terms of OEL, the technical details all revolve around a RH based Linux that can run Oracle with pre-tuned parameters (memory settings, disk buffers and so on).
They also support other OS distributions including Debian (*) and Solaris.
* DISCLAIMER: I have customers (and therefore a business relationship with Oracle) that run Oracle XE on Debian Lenny.
-geoff
--------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/