tonytib wrote:

You do have a valid point that others than RH can support RH.

Well, thank you for noticing that what I posted, I guess.

...you don't address Andrew's gripes about RH's growing dominance, and "the community" / "great unwashed Linux loudmouths" / whatevers inconsistent treatment of RH & its competitors.

I'm not sure what the point is, there.

In extreme cases, if some idiot ISV's technical support people say their application is "supported only on Red Hat" and I'm trying to report a bug, I'll just load the most recent RH ISOs onto a spare partition, reboot, replicate the bug, and report it again. Adds about an hour to the process. No RHAS or support contracts needed.

Actually, though, about the only situation where just telling the guy that /etc/rh-release says "n.n" when you're actually running Linux-Mandrake doesn't work is Oracle, and, there, the machine needs to be just a dedicated Oracle/RH box that's used for nothing else, anyway.

The sheep-like tendency of some ISVs and the tendency of some cretinous firms to cite any excuse to deny customer service is duly noted.

But those who don't like "Red Hat's growing dominance" can try instead saying "Actually, I'm running Mandrake, and, if you're unwilling to help me, you're going to lose me as a customer" -- and mean it.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com