I've worked in places where "official" commercial-level support is required when a system is in production. In those situations, I didn't have control over the staff at any level, just pointing out it's a thing I've seen at least twice in 20 years and 4 jobs.

Well, two things here.

First: Really, the requirement for vendor 'support' is something I've always had a bit of a hard time rationalizing.. Getting a vendor in for consultancy/implementation help is a bit of a different story though and is often worth it.

Back to support.. The old "Alright, we pay RedHat or Oracle for support for when something breaks" thing.. The reality is when something does go arse over bollocks you'll get two options from your vendor (at least from sun, oracle, redhat, ibm and sap in my experience): upgrade to the latest version, or downgrade until you get a code fix from the vendor. Your critical oracle 10 db running on some older redhat point release shits itself? Not their problem. Hope you have backups. They will take file a bug internally to prevent it happening again but they can't do much more than you can internally to get things back up.

I've been in ops for almost 15 years and I still don't have a single story of a vendor 'saving the day' outside of hardware support (actually, that's not true -- once Joyent solved a problem for us by patching some servers within about an hour of us reporting a problem which remains the single greatest support experience in my life).

We worked out how to do software upgrades and rollbacks a decade ago, if one shitty linux kernel package is enough to down your business then yeah, you're doing things wrong and hopefully will learn from the experience, but paying a support fee per instance isn't going to help you recover or avoid those things.

I think we agree, all I'm trying to say is at least in my experience: You're almost always better spending your money on good staff than support contracts.

Second: In what world do you live in that your sysadmins can write kernel patches during prod outages? Maybe your reality is very different to mine, but adding/changing code has never been the solution to bad outages (and I've been through some gnarly ones, trust me) for me so far...

If there were something better than Unix we would replace Unix with that something and keep the name. But yes, that was the joke, and no, it was not a very good one.

It was a joke, actually. The quote I was referencing is, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." I actually wrote a (short) book on the ways of the Unix shell, which hopefully qualifies me to have an opinion on the matter. Although UHH is quite dated, there is and has been a great deal of legitimate criticism of Unix, and for that matter C and Bash as well. You have mistaken my opinion on the matter, but your eagerness in assigning negative qualities here is something you might want to examine. To be clear, I do consider Unix and Bash to be imperfect but essential tools for any programmer.