It's not about whether the technology will die per se; it's about whether they are contractually guaranteed that there will be a professional support team in pl

It's not about whether the technology will die per se; it's about whether they are contractually guaranteed that there will be a professional support team in place to support it for X years, and whether the vendor's ability to fulfill that contract over the long term is perceived as realistic by the client. Consulting mailing lists and IRC for a DIY solution is not an acceptable solution for most enterprise users. Moreover, there's nobody to sue if something goes wrong. Red Hat was formed to fill that gap, but so far it has had only modest success. Companies like IBM, HPE, and Oracle exist because they are perceived as stable, likely to be able to support their technology over the long term. For example, mainframes and COBOL are largely long dead technologies, but banks that bought mainframes running COBOL from IBM in the 1970s are still very much getting active commercial-grade support for those technologies from IBM today.