Red Hat offers RHEL support ‘forever’ for those who need to lock in to legacy tech

OS PLATFORMS

Beware the golden screwdriver

Red Hat has created a new support offering for its flagship Enterprise Linux that it characterizes as “RHEL forever” and has “no pre-determined end date.”

The IBM business unit says the offering, formally known as “The Long-Life Add-On,” will “keep older minor or major versions of RHEL secure and stable” by providing critical patches, urgent bug fixes, and 24x7 tech support for as long as customers keep paying for it.

Red Hat reckons the super-extended support is needed because platform migrations often become necessary when OS support expires, which can happen long before an application becomes obsolete.

Longer support, the outfit argues, “gives IT leaders the freedom to synchronize software lifecycles with long-term hardware investments or complex regulatory timelines rather than forced upgrade schedules.”

Red Hat already offers a support package called “Extended Life Cycle, Premium” that delivers updates to major RHEL releases for 14 years, or six years of extended maintenance for specific minor releases.

This very elongated support package isn’t a bonkers idea: In 2013, The Register reported GE’s Canadian outpost seeking staff to keep PDP-11 code working until 2050, because it helps to run a nuclear power plant – an extremely change-averse environment.

But it’s also plain that anyone signing up for services like this will find it almost impossible to avoid lock-in and therefore expose themselves to increasing costs.

In the late 1990s, your correspondent did some marketing work for long-dead minicomputer vendor Wang as it spluttered towards irrelevance. By this time, the company’s channel had evaporated, leaving Wang as the sole source of professional services for any of its machines and code that customers had not replaced.

Wang quickly hiked support prices. I was told it added a four-figure call-out fee just to show up and investigate a customer problem – a charge I heard referred to as a “golden screwdriver” because at that point only Wang staff could touch one of the company’s boxes without invalidating warranties.

Red Hat will, of course, swear hand on heart that it will never behave so badly if customers need to extend a contract into a third or fourth decade of RHEL support. Whether its future sales reps and account managers live that promise is unknowable. ®