On 07/19/2012 09:52 AM, Federico Alves wrote:
> You are wrong in all directions. Dell resells RHEL subscriptions, for a
> little over $300 x server, but they are not otherwise involved or provide
> any services, just sell it any client that has a Dell account. Until last
> year, Red Hat provided real support, via email, and it did work. I solved
> a few issues by opening cases in the Red Hat's web site. It was part of my
> eco system. I also relied upon the updates.That changed this year,
> unbeknownst to me. I renewed my subscription this year and found, to my
> dismay, that I could no longer open a support case. Dell informed me that
> the basic support had been removed from the subscription, but I was not
> aware of that change, so I complained and they promptly returned my money.
> Red Hat is offering nothing at all for the subscription fee, because I can
> get updates from other sources and I can get community support from
> Google. So they actually are getting money for nothing, or try to. Not
> from me this time. I am a small business with just a few Dell servers, and
> feel betrayed by Red Hat. What exactly are they charging for? All the
> software packages are open source and were developed by the people.
> Without support,any subscription to a free product is basically attempted
> fraud.

You're still not telling me if you can get support if your subscription 
was through Red Hat, though. Have you even looked into this? Dell not 
providing support is a Dell problem, and not very surprising.

Can anyone verify this? The office here in Japan is telling me they 
offer support with a basic subscription if the subscription is direct, 
and of course offer an array of paid support beyond that. I feel sure 
the story must be the same elsewhere.

Anyway, it doesn't make any fiscal sense for Red Hat to offer Dell a 
huge volume discount as a reseller and then foot the support burden for 
things that may or may not be Dell issues to begin with.

As far as the other merits of having a company around to do the 
muck-work of filtering out the flotsam inherent in the open source 
ecosystem... you don't seem to appreciate how much work goes into that. 
If you hate Red Hat so much I suggest you move on to Fedora or Debian or 
Arch or Gentoo or Vine or something. CentOS and SL aren't options if you 
truly believe that Red Hat affords you no value.