Sorry but that's an asinine reply. The people looking for the support are busy doing something and looking to pay a company for the support. If they had the time to volunteer for support, they wouldn't be looking for support themselves. You're the one touting Debian out of nowhere, you can't ask the people you're talking to, to volunteer to make your point better.

The people wanting to pay for support can absolutely move to rhel with no pain what so ever.

There's Freexian (as in company) if you want: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended

How good are Freexian / Debian ELTS compared to RHEL for their 10 years support and security fixes? Are they cost effective?

https://www.freexian.com/lts/extended/docs/cost-estimation/

>The people looking for the support are busy doing something and looking to pay a company for the support

I mean, if they are using CentOS, apparently not.

What an inside out reasoning

So we want:

1. free/gratis Linux distribution

2. long support (~ 10 years)

3. not needing to contribute (as a community)

It seems that we can only pick two from this list (even a distribution with short support cycle needs community).

"what would a grad student know about the real world" is seeming like fair analysis given this.

Universities aren't the real world and I was right about redhat.