The contradiction is mostly in the fact that when Oracle offers support for Unbreakable Linux, how can they help customers if they cannot make changes ?

Either they help customers and actively fix problems and improve the product (as part of the support contract) or they passively wait for Red Hat to fix those bugs.

If Oracle relies on Red Hat to fix certain bugs than customers actually rely on Red Hat's support not Oracle's support and as a result Oracle's support will never be better than the support Red Hat provides. (Maybe that explains why it is cheaper ?)

I can see how Oracle can help Red Hat by providing fixes, but I don't see how Red Hat's service would improve by undermining Red Hat's business model. In fact, by taking a swing at Red Hat's revenue, the support model becomes weaker instead of stronger.

And the fact that Red Hat's stock plunged 30% and the signal Oracle is sending to the financial world does not help Red Hat or Linux an inch, quite the opposite.

So I have a hard time understanding why Oracle did what it did. All indicators point to foul play to me.

PS YaST does not work on top of the OS, it cuts into most of the sysadmin tasks and often breaks config-files that have been handcrafted. YaST actually requires that start-up scripts and /etc/sysconfig-files are heavily modified.

I am all for a smitty-alike tool for Red Hat but linuxconf and YaST, to me, take the wrong approach.