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I think (or at least I hope) that anyone who buys a support contract from a third-party company for a third-party distribution understands that they are not get

I think (or at least I hope) that anyone who buys a support contract from a third-party company for a third-party distribution understands that they are not getting the same level of support that they would from Red Hat. There is lots of room in the enterprise sector for third-party support. This is, for example, what almost all consultants effectively are. The third-party vendor can solve a lot of problems that the customer may not have the experience to deal with and can be well worth the price paid. But at the end of the day if there's an actual bug all the way upstream in RHEL, only RHEL can (permanently) fix that. I've dealt with Red Hat in the past and one good thing about their support is that if you have a particularly thorny problem or a genuine bug, you will often eventually end up talking directly to someone who is either wrote the code or sits next to the person who did.

freedomben 4y ago
You make some great points, thanks (side note: I love HN for conversations exactly like this one). You've won me over somewhat. As long as the support vendor isn't misrepresenting what they offer and how it differs from Red Hat, it doesn't seem nearly as unethical as it felt initially. I've only had experience with a handful of vendors, but all of them marketed themselves as "same support as Red Hat, 1/4 to 1/2 the price." I find that gross, but if it were "we'll help you setup and configure your machine" rather than "use us instead of Red Hat" I don't really have an issue with that.
- flatiron 4y ago
  Nobody ever got fired for hiring red hat for red hat support. To the other post’s point those may not be the contracts red hat wants. They want big enterprise where there is 0 reason to not go red hat.
carwyn 4y ago
It goes further than that. If you file a bug on Red Hat's bugzilla with or without a support contract, you will quite often get a response if you put the effort into producing a detailed report. No guarantee, sometimes just others with the same issue, but still pretty good. You will also find Red Hat employees on the mailing lists for the OSS projects they contribute or depend on who actively participate in conversations there. If you have a support contract though and open a case, the level and quality of support is usually very high.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  Is this still true after the IBM acquisition?
  - bonzini 4y ago
    There's been absolutely no change for most employees after the acquisition.
    - worthless-trash 4y ago
      Can confirm. No change in product security.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      Awesome to hear!
  - djbusby 4y ago
    I've been involved with companies buying from IBM for over 20 years. Since the Lotus Notes days I've always been impressed by their support chasing down hairy issues. Like, their tier1 would escalate to T3 when mostly needed. Compare to Google where robots lock you out for days. Expensive but never had a client be mad about it.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  This isn't my experience at all. I've personally had three paid support cases attached to Bugzilla issues. Two of them were for bugs that had one-line fixes that were already committed upstream, along with test cases, and that I just needed Red Hat to backport. They sat for about 6 months before I got any response other than the automated monthly "our engineers are working on the Bugzilla." The third was for a problem that existed upstream too. It was opened over 2 years ago and still isn't fixed.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    BZ number for the third? Also what components?

freedomben 4y ago

You make some great points, thanks (side note: I love HN for conversations exactly like this one). You've won me over somewhat. As long as the support vendor isn't misrepresenting what they offer and how it differs from Red Hat, it doesn't seem nearly as unethical as it felt initially. I've only had experience with a handful of vendors, but all of them marketed themselves as "same support as Red Hat, 1/4 to 1/2 the price." I find that gross, but if it were "we'll help you setup and configure your machine" rather than "use us instead of Red Hat" I don't really have an issue with that.

flatiron 4y ago
Nobody ever got fired for hiring red hat for red hat support. To the other post’s point those may not be the contracts red hat wants. They want big enterprise where there is 0 reason to not go red hat.

carwyn 4y ago

It goes further than that. If you file a bug on Red Hat's bugzilla with or without a support contract, you will quite often get a response if you put the effort into producing a detailed report. No guarantee, sometimes just others with the same issue, but still pretty good. You will also find Red Hat employees on the mailing lists for the OSS projects they contribute or depend on who actively participate in conversations there. If you have a support contract though and open a case, the level and quality of support is usually very high.

jacobr1 4y ago
Is this still true after the IBM acquisition?
- bonzini 4y ago
  There's been absolutely no change for most employees after the acquisition.
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    Can confirm. No change in product security.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    Awesome to hear!
- djbusby 4y ago
  I've been involved with companies buying from IBM for over 20 years. Since the Lotus Notes days I've always been impressed by their support chasing down hairy issues. Like, their tier1 would escalate to T3 when mostly needed. Compare to Google where robots lock you out for days. Expensive but never had a client be mad about it.
josephcsible 4y ago
This isn't my experience at all. I've personally had three paid support cases attached to Bugzilla issues. Two of them were for bugs that had one-line fixes that were already committed upstream, along with test cases, and that I just needed Red Hat to backport. They sat for about 6 months before I got any response other than the automated monthly "our engineers are working on the Bugzilla." The third was for a problem that existed upstream too. It was opened over 2 years ago and still isn't fixed.
- bonzini 4y ago
  BZ number for the third? Also what components?