On Jan 8, 2015, at 8:48 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca> wrote: > these influential people have chosen not to pay RH > for their offering. It might be of some interest to RH in determining > why this is so. I’ll tell you why we don’t subscribe. First, we don’t need their support. We’re quite capable of coping with problems ourselves, including those problems that are *caused by* Red Hat, or allowed into RHEL by Red Hat’s gatekeepers. We’ve been doing this since the GNU experience meant building executables from tarballs on top of some paid-for commercial Unix. Second, the customers we send these boxes out to don’t *want* Red Hat’s support. They want to call us, not Red Hat. That means we “own” these boxes' problems. Good thing we’re capable of solving them. There’s a price to not paying Red Hat: we take responsibility for coping with any problems. The CentOS warranty is that if it breaks, we get to keep both pieces. We’re fine with that. Anyone that isn’t fine with that — those who think someone other than themselves should be responsible for fixing problems with the free OS they’re using — should be using something else.