An example of software-industry practices by Oracle: After Oracle bought ATG (e-commerce software vendor), they assigned an engineer to remove the code that detected and limited the number of concurrent users. ATG software is licensed by the number of concurrent users, and had for a long-time a mechanism to limit usage to the actual number of licenses for that specific customer. Oracle removed the limit code so that some customers would unwittingly exceed their licensed number. The intent was that these customers could be targeted by Oracle's license police, who'd extract high financial penalties.

A hard-nosed business decision. Potentially lucrative, profitable. Not illegal. But demonstrating utter contempt and manipulation of their customers. If this is how Oracle treats its own customers, how do you think they treat competitors like CentOS and the OSS community?

I am quite familiar with ATG, having worked with the product since 2001. I don't believe that Oracle removed the license limitation on purpose, but rather to make ATG consistent with their other products which you can download, install and develop with, but as soon as you use them for production you have to pay.

You also have to factor in that ATG's old licensing department was chronically incapable of delivering the correct license files: they used to send out production licences for the wrong IP addresses, session limitations or bad expiration dates, and it wasn't uncommon to have 3 or 4 runarounds with them in order to have what you paid for.

That said, I'm not looking forward to use Oracle Linux in any of our production servers, unless my clients specifically asks for it and pays for the support. And this support has to be of very high quality, it will take me just one canned reply to put CentOS back in.