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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that sounds scary, but we already get that with a lot of open source software written by consultancies selling a paid version.

(Red hat is disincentivized from making the Linux ecosystem more sane on a deep level.)

At the end of the day, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law, it's probably more feasible to incentivize less sharply: UBI with the incentive improve society's productivity and you and everyone else get's more stuff. Do that overly-blunt incentivisation along with the overly-sharp incentivisation we have today, and we might strike some sort of better balance if not spectral (bluntness ~ wavelength) coverage.

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> Red hat is disincentivized from making the Linux ecosystem more sane on a deep level.

That's a bit confusing. Are you able to expand on that, so it's easier to understand?

Red Hat is making its money by selling support. The more obfuscated the system is, the more $$$ they make.

Eh. Most of the Red Hat projects people complain about are targeted mainly at desktops, as opposed to servers. And when it comes to desktops, Red Hat’s biggest competition isn’t Ubuntu or CentOS or whoever; it’s Microsoft. There are far, far more users using Windows, who might be convinced to switch to Red Hat if it works well, than there are users using other Linux distros, who might be convinced to buy support if the packages they share work poorly.

Not sure how it is these days, now that IBM is calling the shots, but when I worked at Red Hat (~2010-2015) the vast majority of people did their level best to make things work well.

Some points:

* While "support" is part of their business, so is training, consulting, etc.

* Not sure what to lump performance tuning under, nor writing up white papers, tuning guides, and best practise docs. But there are whole teams which did that (back then anyway) for products like RHEL.

With support, wouldn't it make more sense for things to be clearer and easier, so there's less staff time needed to provide the documentation and support?

Saying that because AFAIK the places that pay for support (rather than use CentOS or similar) are more doing it for compliance reasons than straight out really needing (much?) support. eg they're going to pay for it anyway, even if they don't really use it

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