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> Redhat makes plenty of money and has a monopoly on nothing. Redhat managed to leverage their monopoly on their own trademarks to prevent anyone unauthorized
by webmaven 6y ago
> Redhat makes plenty of money and has a monopoly on nothing.
Redhat managed to leverage their monopoly on their own trademarks to prevent anyone unauthorized from offering Redhat-branded support services, coupled with the time-bound monopoly on their own updates (because obviously no one gets those until they actually get distributed) that translates into a short delay for other vendors to incorporate those improvements (and longer if any discussion of whether to include them is warranted).
For most purposes these delays are inconsequential, but plenty of customers are willing to pay for the privilege of getting bugs and critical security fixes distributed and deployed ASAP just so zero-day vulns can't become one- or two-day ones (at best).
It's worth noting that this is more a matter of perception than reality, since by far the biggest factor delaying the eventual deployment of updates including critical security fixes is the customer's own internal processes, but it is hard to get a customer to admit that going from a 15-day to a 14-day delay hardly justifies paying a premium.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoYou're just using a pedantic definition of monopoly that would cause anybody to have a monopoly on something. It's equivalent to saying that no two pieces of real estate are identical so land ownership is a monopoly, even though in practice land is fungible with other land and owning one piece of land is not what anybody means by a monopoly. Redhat is clearly not the iOS app store or 1970 AT&T. Trademarks aren't even property, they're a consumer protection mechanism. You nominally can't even sell them, though the restriction is more in theory than in practice.
- webmaven 6y agoI'm not being pedantic. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are all monopolies, and most of their realizable market value is derived from that (more technically, the exclusivity is what enables the conversion of use value to market value). Trade secrets are an even more extreme case of a monopoly that doesn't even have the expiration dates of patents and copyrights, or the active defense requirement of a trademark.