Let's look at your examples about Red Hat and GitLab. Managers pay for service contracts from those companies so they have a "throat to choke" if things go sid

Let's look at your examples about Red Hat and GitLab. Managers pay for service contracts from those companies so they have a "throat to choke" if things go sideways so it's not simply their neck on the line. From a CIO's point of view, a service contract is an insurance policy against standing before the CEO or board and saying "I have nobody but myself to blame, I have nobody but my team to fix the issue -- and they don't know how." Typically it's a start-up or a company where the CEO/founders are driving the technical decisions where you find IT using CentOS, PostgreSQL, etc without a support contract... and when there's enough revenue or investors buying that "throat to choke" is part of due diligence in a growing business.