It was exciting when a year ago at LinuxWorld Expo London we heard a rumour that Oracle was going to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was surprising to find out that this rumour was not entirely as well-intended and supportive as it sounded.
Instead of helping the community, Oracle was directly attacking Red Hat with its own product as if it was showing the world that Open Source has no value and that even Oracle could run away with Red Hat's crown jewels and customers. A hostile take-over attempt of Red Hat by Oracle.
What the world did not understand (and Oracle tried to hide) is that the business value is not in the source-code, but in the development and the community. Red Hat is involved in most of the Open Source projects and in fact is able to support their product for 7 years because they have the experts and the insight of how projects work. Oracle has not.
Another well-hidden fact of Oracle's promotional buzz is that you cannot both be compatible with RHEL, and provide bugfixes and improvements. Either you make changes, or you stay compatible with the original. So whatever Oracle stated was self-contradictory. All the articles at the time failed to mention that, riding on Oracle's wave.
Now that Oracle is porting YaST to Red Hat (who in their right mind would want to have YaST on RHEL is beyond my comprehension) it becomes all that obvious that whatever procedure you have for RHEL or CentOS it will not work with YaST. Once you use YaST, you cannot change (a lot of) configuration files by hand.
I always tell people at tradeshows that "CentOS is completely compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the bugs". And even though that seems a bit harsh, it is very true and it is exactly what we want to tell people. We cannot replace Red Hat's support because we need to be compatible and therefor rely on Red Hat's support. We cannot fix any bugs ourselves. That means that if you really need support (and you cannot support yourself), you need to get it from Red Hat.
The CentOS users rely on us to provide a compatible product and Oracle is fooling their customers if they tell them otherwise...
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