On Jan 30, 2020, at 9:37 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote: > > On 1/24/20 8:02 AM, Simon Matter via CentOS wrote: >> >> I've never really understood how hiding those solutions behind a wall is a >> good thing in/for the OpenSource world. Looks like I'm not alone :-) > > A good thing is the ability for someone to be able to pay people actual > money so that CentOS can actually exist. There is no CentOS (or > Scientfic Linux or Oracle Linux) without RHEL. There is no RHEL if Red > Hat can not make money. > > If one is not smart enough to support their own install .. the answer is > .. buy RHEL. While I think I agree with you in principle, this case doesn’t really fall into the category you’re outlining, for several reasons. 1. dnf is complaining that "nothing provides module(perl:5.26)” when Perl is evidently installed. How did it get there if nothing provides it? I don’t see how this is anything but a packaging bug. If the financial stability of the Red Hat subsidiary of IBM, Inc. depends on people paying them for advice on how to get around broad-based bugs Red Hat created — or at least allowed to pass QA — that’s a perverse incentive that will ultimately damage the subsidiary. 2. I would think that the “support” you speak of, the lifeblood of the Red Hat subsidiary, is principally one-to-one, where the recipient is getting value they could not easily receive any other way. That should exclude problems so common that they end up in the knowledge base. That’s one-to-many, which means the per-recipient value of the information is amortized. The bottom line is that I think the community here is acting as an auxiliary QA arm for Red Hat, benefiting their paying customers. Our payment? I’ll take some more CentOS, thanks. :)