RedHat Openstack announcement causes an uproar

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in linux on (#3KQ)
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 :
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?
Reply 2 comments

All of the above to a certain extent... (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-15 15:57 (#1MX)

There is usually more than one factor contributing to any event. In reality, the CEO probably got a lot of feedback from a lot of directions, the press screwed stuff up, and Red Hat's competitors used the opportunity for FUD. Now the CEO backpedals. It's what they're paid to do (Sort of... In reality, they're really paid for speaking publicly in a way that doesn't blow stuff up in the first place. Actually, if you want to get to the bottom of this "issue", I'd check Red Hat's board for their decision on hiring the CEO in the first place, but we usually don't take root cause analysis quite this far).

Support vs support (Score: 1)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-05-15 20:53 (#1MZ)

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.