[stephenr]

How about something new.

Forget this idea of a company that produces yet another fucking distro with just enough changes so its not 100% compatible with whatever it's forked from, and then charge for support.

How about a company that simply sells support services for an existing, community owned distro like Debian. If it makes sense for that company to donate to the Debian project, and/or hire staff to contribute to Debian packages to improve them, thats great too.

[AceJohnny2]

Huh, I thought I could easily list a dozen companies that will provide commercial support for Debian.

In the early 2000s, HP had committed to supporting Debian, but I no longer see it listed on their Linux Support page.

I know the european market has a healthy ecosystem of consultant companies that provide support for open source products.

[stephenr]

It's quite likely there are companies providing the type of thing Im talking about already - I haven't really looked.

My point was more that this is the type of thing people/companies should be looking for in a Linux support contract, rather than another "services" company rolling it's own Linux distro so they can lock customers in with incompatibility.