[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.