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Comment by spectre256 | Hacker News Reader

RedHat is (was?) sortof an example, but their product wasn't the open source software per-se, it was the guarantees their consulting and support offers.

RedHat makes, for example, patches for kernel vulnerabilities, but they actually give that away for free. What they sell is a promise that when there's a new vulnerability, you can get a patch from them quickly.

They also spread this service across MANY different open source packages. Like you said, a company that just offered services around a smaller package would have to run a lot more lean and would probably be a risky venture.

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>RedHat makes, for example, patches for kernel vulnerabilities, but they actually give that away for free. What they sell is a promise that when there's a new vulnerability, you can get a patch from them quickly.

What's preventing someone from freeloading? It sounds like regardless of whether you're paying, you can still get the patches.

Nothing, in fact Oracle is freeloading with Oracle Linux. But people prefer getting the thing from people that have a better track record and have direct access to the developers.

It's much harder for freeloaders to accept feature requests from customers, for example, because that would result in a fork.

Nothing. CentOS is RHEL without the logos and tech support.

If you're running IT for a major corporation and you have an issue with your OS that prevents your business from operating, what do you do? Hope that your IT team figures out an issue they've never seen before in code they have no particular expertise in? No, you want to be able to pull in people who actually know the technology and have seen it all before.

Right. It would have been be clearer if I sad people pay RedHat for the promise that they quickly make a patch for any issue available, and that they know how to identify which patches are relevant for any individual customer.

What's the joke where someone fixes some machine and charges $1000? Their cost breakdown was:

turning a knob: $1

knowing which knob to turn: $999

> What's preventing someone from freeloading?

If you catch any bugs specific to your systems or need special feature Red Hat is always there to help because a lot of open source software developers are as well Red Hat employees.

If you use CentOS or whatever other RHEL-based distribution there is no support at all other the one community might provide.

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