New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux (InformationWeek)

Mission critical stuff like this you DO NOT screw around with. If the vendor supports their
package under AIX, HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Solaris, and nothing else, then those
are what your choices are.

That the package will work under CentOS, *BSD, etc is irrelevant. You don't want to be on the
receiving end of the TPTB's wrath if the package breaks (for any reason) and vendor refuses to
help you because you put in on CentOS 5 instead of RHEL5.

I'm not affiliated with Red Hat in anyway, still, I think that calling Red Hat's service
subscriptions as "tax" is unfair or impropriate. By all means it isn't comparable in any
degree to M$ offerings, which are very binding by nature and thus makes switching very hard or
in worst cases practically impossible. This is the significant difference.

Secondly I really wonder, how a financial organization can run any critical systems without
payed support, either internal or external. Here the difference is that the organization can
hire couple of Linux kernel hackers, but not the other way.

In other words "tax" plays down to free beer -thinking, which is just wrong.

True, I'm a big fan of Debian and Gentoo. 

But our vendors have either specified support for either 
Red Hat Linux or Solaris for the vast majority of our 
applications. No support for SuSE, Debian or any other
distro. 

So Engineering has declared that RH Linux is THE supported
standard for applications. Both internally and from our vendors, 
so..... 

Yea I know.