Story

For most OSS projects there is an upstream open source project with a community of developers. I would expect that to continue to be open and "supported". Supprt ususually entails mailing list or forums as well as bug fixes, ect.

That project is then packaged by OS distributions. Now, the OS distribution will typically provide support for any of their packages that they provide. But, if you install a third party version of one of those packages, that would typically not be supported.

So was it a misunderstanding between the support of the Open source project and the support on the distribution? That's the only thing that makes sense to me. The Walls treet journal article is behind a paywall, so I can't really read it.