Open source used to be used as a marketing tool --- people believed that software was automatically better if it was Open Source. Today, people have learned h

Open source used to be used as a marketing tool --- people believed that software was automatically better if it was Open Source. Today, people have learned how to be more nuanced; just because it is better in some FSF sense (if it is "free software" in the Stallman/GPL ethical/moral sense of the word) doesn't mean it's better for a particular business purpose. If you're a developer, or your company has a development shop where it's prepared to make changes, then obviously Open Source is better. If however, you're prepared to contract out support and development to a company like Red Hat, then from your perspective as a customer, it may not matter as much. As long as you are willing to pay $$$ to Red Hat and the software/services/support is of sufficient quality for your purposes, you're happy. Now replace "Red Hat" with "Oracle" in the above statement; does it still work? Why, yes. So you really won't care if it's Open Source or not. At one point there was an argument that Open Source is good because you're free to change to a different vendor. i.e., if you don't like Red Hat's services, you could always switch to SuSE. In practice, alas, the ways in which various boot and configuration scripts are set up are just a tiny bit different enough that it's often not trivial to switch from one Linux provider to another. So the main difference is whether or not you're willing to make changes to the source code and recompile. But if you're a Red Hat customer, the moment you do that you use lose support for your modified package. So most Red Hat customers probably don't take advantage of the fact that all Red Hat software is "open source", at least not in a direct way. And in that case, why bother trying to use it as a marketing term?