Really? Any numbers? Cause I aleays comented that for allnthe companies I've worked, even the ones thatnloterally developed proprietary desktop software for Linux and thus had RedHat on all workstations... they never sent a single dime to RedHat.
Were they actually running RedHat Enterprise Linux, or was it something like Fedora or CentOS? CentOS was basically RHEL with the branding stripped, but I don't believe they had any kind of support agreements.
They do charge for extra benefits, if you need them. But you can deploy a server to production today on Debian and be fine. Unless your in the case where you need to pay for support (regulatory).
Just because RH, Suse and Canonical charge, does not mean those are requirements. You can always opt to have linux and not pay for their support.
If you can handle the churn of building against a new platform every year or two instead of every decade or more, you can keep all your stuff patched without an extended support license.
This is a valid point, but I wonder how many installs are managed through a commercial contract. My assumption is that it would be a small number of high value contracts, but the bulk of installs are just free Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora installs.
What does that have to do with paying? Only RHEL requires that you pay for patches/updates. If you're running Debian, Ubuntu, etc you get all your patches and updates for free; no need to pay.
It really comes down to the requirements for your app as defined by the vendor and/or the internal team.