"When we called Redhat about a question their support hemmed and hawed over an answer."
"Now when we called Oracle they turned around the answer very quickly, and gave us a great response."
Customer support can be very hit or miss, but it did confirm to me that someone is both using and is happy with Oracle's approach to its distribution.
What else did I find interesting about this? The user in question wasn't an Oracle database user, they had for some reason just picked Oracle over Redhat.
Redhat is way a head of the game installations. Even with white box vendors and Oracle making its version available for download, the install base of RHEL is larger. Oracle's Linux is market validation for Redhat's approach to creating a Linux distribution (which is pretty important when you consider the encroachment that Ubuntu is making on this).
A little competition is great for the consumer.
And on that note, I think I might just go check out the CentOS Beta :)