On 2023-07-21 00:30, Lee Thomas Stephen wrote:
But for my business, I do not want to pay Red Hat, Zimbra, or Google Workspace. Why ? Because the general rule seems to be Oh! You are an individual, we will offer you affordable/free service What! You are a business, we will offer you extremely 'unaffordable' service. Because being a 'business' by default means you have a 'lot' of money to waste.
I'm not a Red Hat employee, so I'm not positive how they would respond to that. But, speaking as a customer who has worked with numerous enterprise support agreements over several decades, I want to suggest that the issue isn't that Red Hat assumes that businesses have a lot of money to spend, it's that they're targeting a set of the market that you might not be in right now.
From my point of view, Red Hat doesn't really sell software. They give away software. All of their software is available at no charge, typically in an unbranded release. What Red Hat sells is support.
I don't mean helpdesk style "support-me-when-something-breaks" support. Support isn't something that exists only during incidents, support is a relationship. It's periodic meetings with your account manager and engineers. It's discussing your roadmap and your pain points regularly, and getting direction from them. It's the opportunity to tell Red Hat what your needs and priorities are, and helping them make decisions about where to allocate their engineers time to address the real needs of their customers. It's setting the direction for the company that builds the system that sits underneath your technical operations. That kind of support is what makes RHEL a valuable offering.
If you don't need the kind of support that comes with enterprise offerings, then by all means, use the Free Software that Red Hat provides to the community. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Red Hat is trying to mlik businesses simply because they're businesses. Red Hat's offerings are expensive because they're enterprise-focused support plans.
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