Ask HN: Do you pay for a commercial server OS (Solaris, RedHat..)? Why? Why not

It's like paying home insurance. If something breaks down we can point to these support company and say I'm waiting on their reply. Most of the time the support is useless as they say it's your custom code blah we don't support it.

Lot of times Google search is faster than getting an answer from support. Most of the support is outsourced and they're not developers. They take product manual and will instruct things like did you reboot it or did you kill the process and reboot. We pay for these kind of nonsense trouble shooting.

Non-commercial (CentOS) for all my development environments. Don't need to worry about licensing fees -- simply spin-up another VMWare instance.

Commercial (Red Hat) for production. Corporate clients want commercial support.