[klodolph]

I don’t understand what kind of point you’re making here.

Are you saying that support contracts are completely worthless because some bugs are closed WONTFIX?

B2B generally does not run on the “let’s screw our customers as much as possible” model. Of course, some do—companies like IBM and Oracle are famously extractive, and cloud providers are trying their best to bait you into getting locked into their cloud.

But in a typical B2B scenario, the support contract is the entry price for having real people read your bug reports and respond in a timely fashion. That’s the starting point, and from there, the bug will get fixed, or you’ll get connected to a “customer support engineer” or someone that will tell you that you’re using the product wrong, or you’ll be given a workaround. Without the support contract, you don’t get the workarounds, you don’t get the fixes, and you don’t get the contact with engineers. You just get to figure it out on your own. Yeah, a percentage of bugs get closed WONTFIX. That’s normal. Yeah, the contract may only require a response and not a fix. The actual practice is that you get some bugs fixed, and some not, and that’s a lot better than your bug reports going straight into the trash.

[adastra22]

In my experience (not with IBM), support contracts get you issues resolved. You get a certain number of incidents per contract, and each one gets resolved. You ask for a feature or bug fix, and they implement it. That’s what you are paying for.

Now Red Hat would have no obligation to upstream or maintain the patch, even to projects they own. But you ask for a big fix under a support contract, they should fix the bug. Even if it’s just a patch for that one customer only.

To be the provider of a support contract and then just turn around and say “nah, won’t fix” in response to an official customer service contract request… I’ve never, ever heard of that in my professional career.

[bonzini]

Sometimes customers come up with feature requests that are reasonable in the surface but would cost millions to implement and maintain. In that case, workarounds are one way to resolve the issue.

> Even if it’s just a patch for that one customer only.

Red Hat does not do one-off patches. If it's fixed in the product, it's fixed for everyone (including upstream).

[magicalhippo]

> In that case, workarounds are one way to resolve the issue.

Yea I always check "why" and if the feature request is not already reasonably well motivated, I'll reach out to the customer and ask.

In my experience it's quite frequent a non-trivial feature or change request can be solved as well if not better by a simple, but different change instead.

Alternatively it allows me to see that three customers are asking for nearly the same thing, even though the feature requests make them sound quite different.