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Sure, but with open-source software and a third-party support contract, if you get mad at the support vendor, you can get a contract with someone else without having to change your software stack.

I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.

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Unfortunately I don't think the market of third party support vendors for open source software is robust enough to have enough competitors that can provide the same quality (or at least promise of quality) as traditional vendor support from MSFT or another big company.

You can say the market might emerge if the large corporations or government agencies started shifting that way and generated demand for it, but those entities aren't known to take risks.

Well, even now we already have Red Hat (IBM), SUSE, and Oracle providing support for enterprise customers for the Linux OS. The US government is a huge customer of Red Hat.

I don't remember where I read it, but wasn't like a majority of relativly big companies operating servers customers of Red Hat?

I do know my mother is a customer with her business

As a government ?

Getting another contract ?

If the press and opposition don’t get you, the time to get a new contract will.

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