[dorfsmay]

I believe RedHat would get a lot more followers, and a lot more support money if they did two things:

- have support contracts that make sense, and trust their customers. Let their customers choose which server they want to put under contract etc...

- have more software in their default repo (like, I don't know... Ubuntu)

They managed to corner the market for pay-for software (to a certain extent, Suse has managed to capture a piece of that market), but they make support and lack of standard software so bad, that people go to extreme length tu run on CentOS and ScientifiLinux, and have a single server running Ubuntu.

[simtel20]

Every time a market collapse is hanging over the finance world, they know their customers will do what a prior employer does/did: put support on 1 of 1000 servers.

It's sad, but this wasn't at a .com rev3 company, this was an old-school hedge fund with billions under management. IT support is just something that gets neglected if there isn't a contract that is enforceable. Clearly the company could afford a thousand systems worth of support, and could make it worth the money (autofs bugs galore!). There is a something missing in making the social contract of open source pay for the people needed to maintain open source.

[dorfsmay]

People do that today.

I know of a few companies which tried to pay for 24 hour support for prod servers, email for QA servers and no support for dev servers, and RedHat insisted on making them pay for anything running RedHat, all or nothing... Companies switched to CentOS and SL, and bought contract for one RedHat server.