Ironically, as a t-shirt/flip-flop nerd myself, I was hoping that this would be something that would appeal to nerds, rather than pissing them off: "Hey, Oracle is giving me this thing that sounds useful for free".
The product itself is appealing. The issue is the company behind it.
I don't disagree with anyone that is wary of Oracles motivation with this product. I also don't disagree that the product itself is nice. But given Oracles known interactions and history with open source an attitude of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" isn't unwarranted.
> Hey, Oracle is giving me this thing that sounds useful for free
We already have that, it is called CentOS. If giving something for free means trying to trample another open source project, then 'No Thanks, I think I'll pass'.
Not sure how to measure "better" in this case. Better for RHEL clones usually means "less changes" than other clones and close to upstream. I guess "better" is support and speed of updates. So in case of a software project you can usually just look at the features and say "oh, look, can see how they added a,b,c and now it is exactly what I want" This is a cloning project, so the best feature is how closely it tracks upstream. But one can't know that unless one switches to it first, and I am guessing, there is enough antagonism in the community that many will not make that first step.
Not only due to the litigious bent. Many past events left a bitter taste - the management of the MySQL products, the end of OpenSolaris (which was a very good Unix distro - and one that lives on) and so on.
This can be interpreted as an attempt to suck the air out of CentOS and Red Hat at the same time. Considering Oracle's past, the hypothesis cannot be ruled out easily.
