[Gllug] Linux support options

[Martin A. Brooks]

Richard wrote:
> I'm looking at the options for supporting a major corporate Linux 
> deployment, and I'm wondering if there's a way to dodge Red Hat's 
> painfully high support contract costs (or their per-server pricing model).

Yes, don't use Redhat.  Use something supportable instead.  Debian 
springs to mind.

> Is anyone aware of other organisations that will offer support for Red 
> Hat systems, other than Red Hat itself. Red Hat is a pre-requisite to 
> keep other vendors (like Oracle) from getting their knickers in a twist. 
> BTW, no, I haven't figured out how patches, etc. would be effected 
> reliably by a third party.

I was contracted to a company that had a number of Redhat development 
machines running Oracle.  These machines would routinely require 
rebooting, were badly patched, and required a large amount of non-Redhat 
software.

I replaced half of them with Debian and they suddenly went upward of 12 
months between reboots.  The company has since moved their production 
systems to Debian.

> I understand that this isn't really very nice to Red Hat; but I also 
> don't see where they get off trying to charge such extortionately high 
> rates.

It's a free market, they can charge whatever they like.  Quite why 
anyone pays for open source software in its own right is beyond me, though.
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