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Story: Debian bangs drum for mission critical apps

Posted by: Andrew Replogle (Saturday 12 March 2005, 1:12 AM)

A very nice article. Just one comment I'd like to point out.

"Commercial Linux vendors, such as Red Hat and SuSE Linux, offer free support to their customers. For example, many of Red Hat's Linux products come with service level guarantees, which vary by product."

Commercial Linux vendors such as Red Hat and SuSE *DO NOT* offer free support. Thats exactly what you're paying for when you license copies of RHES or Suse Professional. The ability to get support from the vendor, as well as access to their online repositories for package and kernel updates.

ie. GPL v2 Section 1 second paragraph:
"You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee."

granted not everything in various distros are under the gpl, but thats just an example.

Of all the things that make up distributions like Red Hat and Suse.. very little of it was actually developed by those vendors.

So just to re-iterate, when you go and spend the extra $$$ for a non-free (as in beer) distro.. it's the support thats costing you that $$$ not the software itself.