Enterprise Linux: is it broken?

Enterprise Linux: is it broken?

Though I find RedHat's use of trademarks to enforce their policy wishes to be somewhat shady, I don't question that they have that right. I am saddened, however, that RedHat has essentially forced me away from using their distribution.

I work for a semi-large company with several hundred employees, but we don't have tens of thousands of dollars to throw around; every year we have to fight a war to keep our IT budget where it is. Over the last seven years, we've installed various versions of RedHat on several dozen servers and have been very pleased with it. Now we're not sure what to do -- be don't have a lot of money to buy licenses, and we don't want to reinstall a new Fedora Core every year and a half. We could have managed to buy something at a reasonable cost (i.e. a one-time cost of $300 for each server, or maybe a yearly cost of $30-50 per server), but unfortunately, RedHat does not seem to want to cater to that price range. They seem to think that there are only two kinds of "customers": rich and poor. There is an entire world in-between that they just don't seem to care about -- those people who don't care about Oracle certification or cluster file systems, but rather just want some refinement and critical security updates for three years or so.

I complain about RedHat's new strategy not because I think they're cheating me -- I can find something else to use -- but rather because they have decided to ignore my business. I've enjoyed using RedHat's products and I would love to purchase an operating system from them, but it just doesn't look like a possibility now. I just don't understand why they won't offer something between Fedora Core and RHEL ES.