A billion thanks to the open source community from Red Hat

E.g. for Telcos, where any outages must be fixed within specified (short) timescales in order to be allowed to sell telco service. It's less risk for a business to say we pay X per year, and if the shit hits the fan we can just pick up the phone.

The other thing offered by RH is to say: here is a distro, we've tested it and can sign off on it being stable. That is also worth a lot in some sectors.

That said, "self-support subscription" per $349/year doesn't feel right to me. May be the old basic support option wasn't that good, but it WAS support you were paying for.

It doesn't change all the good things around Red Hat, but I must admit it's very disappointing.

EDIT: typo

If you're a tech-savvy startup, then sure, you just put a few guys on staff, but if you are most other kinds of businesses, then you'll employ some 'good-enough' administrators for the day to day operations, but you won't be able to necessarily employ a full team for something that isn't core to your business.

Another common scenario is in government, or large companies. Especially in government, we, as tax-payers, would consider it wasteful if the gov were hiring top notch tech engineers to maintain their file shares and directory servers. They are also completely unwilling to put a system in place with a company that not only will be available for same-day support on critical systems, but will also have to be relatively certain that company will be around in 10 years when they are still running those systems.

In short, support is probably more important than you're giving it credit for, but even for customers where it isn't, RH's credibility has opened the doors for every other Linux distribution and their ability to do work inside the Enterprise.

I think that was Jach's point: that omgpop was overvalued.

Things actually work better in the case where there's an ethical but not legally codified understanding, imo, enforced informally through community pressure rather than lawsuits. If you try to add it into legal obligations, complex licenses start piling up; the old BSD advertising clause, for example, was an attempt to turn the ethical principle of "you should prominently acknowledge the work you built on" into a legally enforceable license, which in retrospect most people agree was misguided. But you should still prominently acknowledge the work you built on, anyway, and it's fair to call people out on it if they aren't giving sufficient credit. You can't sue people who don't give sufficient credit (past the bare minimum copyright statement), but you can criticize them and apply community pressure.

Obviously my intent was not well-communicated in my comment. I apologize, but I don't really know how to make it better. :-(

With all that said, those words still ring a bit hollow for me. If the person giving dimes to the homeless were to say, "hey, I wasn't obligated to donate anything to them," that still doesn't quite ameliorate the sheer numerical discrepancy, which is still the point where my brain goes, "wait... what?"

Another comment did: it said, "oh, they're just talking about revenues, not profits." That's a much more important distinction. If Red Hat's costs are very high, then it might not be four dimes but four $100 bills. That's a much more substantial donation given what you got.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/