RedHat Openstack announcement causes an uproar
Call it a non-issue, bad journalism, or a hasty backtrack, but for 24 hours, this was a big deal. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that RedHat would not be supporting competing companies products on its OpenStack cloud software :
Hasty turn-around? A chagrined CEO back-pedaling as a result of sharply more negative press than he'd anticipated? Or just a Wall Street Journalist getting the story wrong. And anyway, is RedHat the next Oracle?
In its quest to sell OpenStack, Red Hat has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The company's support, which includes providing bug fixes and helping customers if they run into technical problems, is a key reason people use Red Hat rather than free versions of Linux.Well, queue up the angry competitors with torches and pitchforks. The CEO of Mirantis, whom RedHat seems to have deemed a competitor, was just one of the many outspoken critics. MegaOm took advantage of the furor to ask, "Is RedHat the new Oracle?" And then, suddenly it was over, as RedHat clarified its cloud offerings would remain open and available for customers to run whatever software they preferred .
Hasty turn-around? A chagrined CEO back-pedaling as a result of sharply more negative press than he'd anticipated? Or just a Wall Street Journalist getting the story wrong. And anyway, is RedHat the next Oracle?
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.