Paul Reiber, UNIX/Linux Customer Service  Red Hat Red Hat has dominated in providing “corporate production Linux” because it not only understands Linux, it understands corporate, and it understands production.  What does it mean to understand corporate?  They provide certification training and tests – RHCSA/RHCE/RHCA – and they’re not just guessing when they say that if you learn the material and pass those tests, you’re qualified to work in a particular capacity with RHEL.  Certification is exactly what’s needed to differentiate between “some smart guy who manages our servers” and “our Red Hat Linux expert, who manages our servers.” Certification means respect, and authority, and the ability to make decisions, not just recommendations.  They provide corporation-friendly licensing. No surprises. Red Hat | Red Hat subscription model: How it works … they have a very good customer portal, available consulting, and outstanding support.  Additionally, from the perspective of understanding corporate, they communicate quite well about their strategies for the future, helping their customers to feel comfortable counting on them.  What does it mean to understand production?  Mainly, it means ensuring that what they do doesn’t break anything.  Red Hat provide carefully-crafted package updates for all packages in all versions of Linux that they currently support. The change sets made to Red Hat’s repos are extremely carefully vetted to ensure they’re safe to apply. This ensures that large corporations (such as hosting companies) can safely allow unattended automatic updates of thousands of production servers en masse.  It also means they don’t put their needs in front of their customers needs, from an operational perspective. You won’t find Red Hat servers failing to boot or work properly because they’re unable to verify their licenses are valid, for example. Licensing is a finance issue, not a production issue.  Lastly, from the perspective of understanding production, they’re not frivolous. You won’t find arbitrary cruft in Red Hat Linux.  What does it mean to understand Linux?  Red Hat is highly dedicated to Open Source. They GET IT. They understand, and they contribute, in a BIG way.  Red Hat isn’t bleeding edge – it’s far from that, it’s goal is to be the most stable release it can be. However, they do lead the way, via the “Fedora” distro, to which they contribute very heavily. If you want to see where Red Hat will be in a few years, check out Fedora.  Fedora users are developers and experimenters. They understand that Fedora is chock full of new things that might, and do, break. And they understand that in helping to fix those new things, they’ll be that much more familiar with them when they’re eventually introduced into Red Hat Linux.
Why did Red Hat ultimately win the battle for monetizing Linux support? This question was originally answered on Quora by Paul Reiber.