Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

Red Hat has painstakingly built over the years a brand that basically meant "we do not play customer-hostile games" (and yes locking the customer in a support website like Oracle or SAP like to do is a customer-hostile game).

This brand meant RHEL sold well even though Red Hat salespeople (that were used to proprietary offerings) messed things up more often than less. Because the engineering departments rooted for Red Hat. Here we see those clueless salespeople winning a round and eroding this brand.

If Red Hat lowers itself to the level of vendors such as Oracle, I fear it will find out over time that on the "who sucks less" playing field others are better organised to win contracts (yay for "educational" conferences the other side of the world).

What an incredibly stupid waste of goodwill.