Why Should Red Hat Support Competitors' Software? 111
colinneagle (2544914) writes "The Wall Street Journal recently reported that, based on documents it reviewed, Red Hat "has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack." But the big question is: Why would customers have expected that in the first place? Gartner analyst Lydia Leong told Network World that Red Hat isn't really doing anything wrong here. Customers shouldn't have an expectation that Red Hat would support competitors' software. "The norm would be to expect that non-Red Hat software is treated like any other third-party software," Leong says. If Red Hat has done anything wrong, it's that it has not clearly articulated its positioning and support for non-Red Hat OpenStack distros. Red Hat did not immediately respond to a question asking for a clarification on its support policy. The complication in all this comes from the fact that OpenStack is an open source project and there are misconceived notions that all OpenStack clouds are interoperable with one another. But Leong says just because OpenStack is open source doesn't change the expectations around vendors supporting competitors' products."
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Are they refusing to support the third party application itself, or are they refusing to support Red Hat Linux when it is used to run a third party application?
The article is badly written, but it sounds like #2, which is indeed bad.
The article does not seem that badly written to me, and it says quite clearly that it is #1. They quote Red Hat's spokesman: "Users are free to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux with any OpenStack offering, and there is no requirement to use our OpenStack technologies to get a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription." So if you buy support for RHEL, they will support it, but they will NOT support third party OpenStacks. Which seems reasonable to me, as long as the terms of the deal are clear.
Re:Matters not... (Score:4, Informative)
There are many other benefits to systemd. Just a quick example that helped me recently; limit the amount of memory used by all apache processes and its descendants. Yes you can do this on your own but systemd makes it quick and easy.