CentOS - impacts due to Red Hat changes implemented

Article

 

I read the comments on the linked article. And I am a bit confused.
Since Red Hat is still releasing the kernel, how will that Oracle from providing support? Why is an incremental list of kernel changes necessary for providing support?

Regarding CentOS/Scientific Linux: Do they change the RHEL kernel?
Can they not use the RHEL kernel as given, and release new kernels when RHEL does, essentially causing them no downside?

 

The whole thing is about enterprise customers obviously.
These are VERY conservative, test EVERYTHING at least 3 times completely before even thinking about rolling it out into production servers. Every patch that comes out means it needs to be tested and deployed which takes a lot of time time and by extension money.

Now with this change only RH is able to tell "their" customers if they really need a certain patch, what problems might arise, how to mitigate them and so on.
Users of CentOS, Oracle Linux and other derivatives can only go the all or nothing approach: Blindly apply all patches that come out or don't patch at all. That of course isn't very attractive to these enterprise customers but won't really hurt CentOS users.

Seems like a pretty clever way if you ask me.

 

If you don't know why they patched and what the patch does it will take time to figure this out, and then once you have figured it out Red Hat releases a new kernel and you have to start all over again.

This may just put me off CentOS and SL

 

Do you work in an enterprise environment?
Do you need to know what the patches fix?
Do you only apply certain patches and not others?