Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ThinkBeat 2025 days ago
If you are operating a billion-dollar computer paying IBM/Redhat is probably a good idea.
4 comments

If you are operating a billion-dollar computer, not using IBM/Redhat is probably a good idea.

At that scale, hiring your own quality support and running open systems is a drop in the bucket.

If you want the full IBM/Redhat experience, then you can even afford to hire 5+ layers of middle management and PMs between you and your engineers.

> At that scale, hiring your own quality support and running open systems is a drop in the bucket.

"support" doesn't mean reading man pages, it means diagnosing and fixing some intermittent bug in Intel's 10G NIC driver.

Also, and this is why you pay Red Hat specifically: Having easy access to the developer that compiled a package, made a particular design decision for the OS, etc.
No offence, I've been in Linux business for 15+ years but I'm struggling to comprehend your comment. Apologies in advance, I'm not a native speaker.
Linux has come so far in the past 20 years, that not paying an annual license fee is now shameful.
Assuming you mean "billion dollar company", I think they always did, but they did it for the support.