“The Wall Street Journal recently reported that, based on documents it reviewed, Red Hat “has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack.” But the big question is: Why would customers have expected that in the first place? Gartner analyst Lydia Leong told Network World that Red Hat isn’t really doing anything wrong here.
Customers shouldn’t have an expectation that Red Hat would support competitors’ software. “The norm would be to expect that non-Red Hat software is treated like any other third-party software,” Leong says. If Red Hat has done anything wrong, it’s that it has not clearly articulated its positioning and support for non-Red Hat OpenStack distros. Red Hat did not immediately respond to a question asking for a clarification on its support policy. The complication in all this comes from the fact that OpenStack is an open source project and there are misconceived notions that all OpenStack clouds are interoperable with one another. But Leong says just because OpenStack is open source doesn’t change the expectations around vendors supporting competitors’ products.”