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For example, how many people who don't work for Red Hat offer Red Hat support services?

Oh, I've no idea. I'd only go to RedHat for "official" RedHat support?

Another intersecting approach is something like Postgres or MySQL. The ownership of the code is irrelevant at this point and we just have independent consultancies (or integrators) providing expert-level services. But, that's almost a complete inversion of the original premise here of open sourcing your own product while retaining product control + revenue from control of said product. (which sounds like what you're afraid of most general "we open sourced our product" situations devolving into.)

In general, I've seen little interest from random Internet companies in providing support for private open sourced software. Nobody wants to spend months/years understanding your software to compete against your knowledge/expertise (unless you get really successful, but that's a whole other game).



> Oh, I've no idea. I'd only go to RedHat for "official" RedHat support?

Let's just say, it's pretty big.

Bonus, you don't need to hire an outside firm to administer your Red Hat servers if you just hire somebody with "can administer Red Hat" on a job req.

Here's a short list just to fill out your curiosity (the real one is likely much longer):

http://www.linuxit.com/linux-support-services/

http://www.dcvast.com/software_support_services/redhat_linux...

http://www.netdigix.com/

http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/supportma...

and so on.

Red Hat as a company more or less exists these days on name brand. In fact, their EBITD margin is negative despite their stock price riding high.




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