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Comment by throwaway892238 | Hacker News Reader

Reasons why people pay for Red Hat:

  1. Customer support
  2. Certifications
  3. Vendor support

I don't know another distribution of Linux that provides all these things to the extent Red Hat does. You don't use Red Hat because you want to, you use it because it's the only choice.

Any business could do exactly the same thing, and do it better than Red Hat. But there's really not much reason for a customer to move away from Red Hat if they're already on it, and it would take you a hell of a long time and a dumptruck full of capital to match them on the above.

Open Core is not a business model, just like Open Source isn't a business model. A business model is promising to fix a customer's problem, certify their software, and get vendors to support them. That alone will get you a yearly renewing contract for a couple million that you then upsell over time.

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>A business model is promising to fix a customer's problem, certify their software, and get vendors to support them.

This can also be described as assuming liability.

Fact of the matter is people don't want to assume liability themselves. If they can pay to get someone else to assume that liability (which Red Hat is happy to do) they will.

The rest of the FOSS ecosystem on the other hand is all about assuming liability yourself. No warranties expressed nor implied, no support, no nothing. For a business that is simply not palatable.

This is also why businesses happily pay tons of monies to Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, etc. for licenses and support. They assume liability, liability the businesses don't want to assume.

I've not seen any license accept liability.

"Assume" is a different word, it means implicitly accept. There is no such thing as an implicit clause in any contract.

Definitely willing to be shown otherwise, but I've never seen any vendor accept liability for there product beyond "you can have your money back, we'll take our software back".

Red Hat offers their paying customers indemnification from software patents for code from their products: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-assurance

That's a HUGE deal for multinationals, and virtually nobody else offers that.

If you're the DoD and you need to run above TS-SCI stuff and somehow Windows isn't a good fit and you don't have any spare fresh-faced kids stealing your docs to impress their virtual friends or leak to newspapers, then you run RHEL on Dell servers flown over UT and Dallas stadiums with all of the S&S fees.

4. We have all the in-house support staff we need and only want to use the self-support license, but since we're a service provider we were forced into the CCSP program where each license costs a lot more.

Forced into how? can you please elaborate?

All service providers have to be in the CCSP program, nothing wrong with that. And we do use it for clients. But it kinda sucks that even our in-house stuff has to cost the same. Discourages use of RHEL in-house.

I don't know another distribution of Linux that provides all these things to the extent Red Hat

Oracle would technically be another one. They will even sell you Oracle Hardware (or Oracle cloud) to run your Oracle Linux. Of course there are many good reasons not to want to use Oracle for this.

When I pay Redhat for customer support how is it different than the vendor support I pay them for?

When you run enterprise product X on Red Hat version Y, that vendor will do less fingerpointing. They may even work with Red Hat in the backend to deal with bugs, etc.

If you go put that on Debian or whatever, they’ll make you reproduce on RHEL.

This becomes a big deal when you have RHEL, VMWare, and other vendors in the mix. If you ignore the certification, the app vendor or VMWare will just shrug at you.

It's a shame your number one reason is customer support, when at least in my experience it has been woefully lacking.

Despite having a reasonably large contract with them at work, we had multiple support tickets go without response for months, with at least one that I am aware of being left open for almost 2 years before being closed as "won't fix"

Noting that its only my personal experience I am sure plenty of others have had the opposite experience, however I have found canonical support to be vastly superior as as such I would never chose RH if support was the primary thing I was after.

That sounds like an account management issue. You need to know how to manage and work with vendors more often than not it’s not the size of the account that matters but how you engage with them.

to be clear when I say no response, I am talking they got consistent updates that essentially said "we have no update on this issue", not them simply never putting anything on them.

also like it or not, by paying for support people have a right to expect that the company being paid will be engaging with you and the request you are putting into there system, not that you will have to find a person to chase down because your tickets are being ignored.

SuSE for example.

SUSE are probably the closest company to following Red Hat's business model (with a more European/German focus). The other ones are the cloud vendors who are getting around to realising now that without certification there are many government orgs, large companies, the military etc who simply cannot use their cloud services.

Which raises the question: Why doesn't Red Hat have a cloud offering yet?

Because it has a partnership model with the big cloud providers and many others.

They have, their own cloud and integrations of it with AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud.

https://docs.openshift.com/

Why would they? Managed services were never part of the Red Hat business model. They've added some cloud stuff as of late, but in general you don't go to Red Hat to buy or lease hardware. And I don't think Red Hat ever had any serious interest in selling you any either.

IBM has a cloud offering, and IBM owns Red Hat

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