> so shifting blame is easy.

But are the contracts actually useful? I wager that to have support from Red Hat is really useful beyond what you may view as "corporate politics".

Yes, very. I previously worked for RH and there really wasn't a top end of support options. I knew of companies with a contract that had RH maintaining custom kernel patched for them. Another paid for a highly skilled SRE to be in their office ready to help anytime. A small number of companies are willing to pay a lot of money for these kinds of options.

Long-term support is critical. For example, Microsoft excels in that area and has patched its really old products to meet new PCI recommendations such as TLS 1.3, which can actually save a lot of money.

Maybe not, but when your certification requires using supported OS and patching know exploits as soon as possible, then you don't have much distro options to choose from if you want easier time to pass an audit.

We've submitted bugs related to IO, and had them promptly fixed.

at least SUSE and Canonical offer corporate support contracts too.

This is a common type of reply, and it’s not inaccurate, but it’s also extremely cynical and misses the bigger point. Pay to blame is only a minor benefit, while stability and having a standard snapshot as a target is far more important.