Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

> - The primary motivation was to make it harder for Oracle Enterprise
> Linux to repackage the work that Red Hat do.

This makes me ache. For the past several years, I'd been fighting an
on-again-off-again argument with the lead DBA at my (mercifully former)
place of employment about OEL vs. RHEL. We'd run all our Oracle DB and
grid infrastructure systems on RHEL from day 1, and we used RHEL everywhere
we needed support contracts to back up proprietary software installations.
The sysadmins didn't want to add a distro migration to their TODO list,
particularly one with no obvious benefits to the other applications we ran
on RHEL. The DBAs argument was invariably "we probably wouldn't have
problem $foo if we ran OEL, and even if we did Oracle would owe us an
explanation becuase we have a support contract." (This is ignoring that
we obviously had a RHEL contract too, our DBA didn't like to leave his
little world of all-things-Oracle.) During the last argument of this
nature, which was centered around the kernel's swap behavior, I visisted
both Oracle and RedHat's archives, pulled down the kernel patches, and
compared them to see if there was *any* way the OEL kernel would behave
differently. At the time there was only one patch that was even close to
being relevant in the mm subsystem and there was no way it was going to
make a difference in the behavior we were trying to figure out. I used
that information to *quickly* shutdown the argument and bring the focus
off of switching to OEL and back to actually figuring out the root cause.
While I could have still made the comparison by grabbing the patches from
rhn (which I assume is where this web UI lives) it would have been an
inconvenience. Assuming that OEL really is the primary motivation behind
this, I'm embarrassed for RedHat. It's far easier to inconvenience your
customers than it is to inconvenience somebody like Oracle.