Important clarification on the support for Red Hat products

[Bryan Yeung]

Dearest Partners,

Driven by the fact that few of your customers have been approached by 
our competitors with support for Red Hat Software (binaries, upgrades, 
patches, fixes, etc), we are writing to clarify the confusions that 
might occur with the sales/renewal process.

Firstly, we understand that customers are confused if our competitors 
are authorized or under contract with Red Hat to provide support for Red 
Hat products. With the exception of certain hardware OEMs (such as IBM, 
HP, Dell, etc.) and a few other select Red Hat partners, Red Hat has not 
authorized any other company to provide support for Red Hat products. In 
particular, we do not have an agreement with Novell nor Oracle to 
provide support for Red Hat solutions. The only exception is a limited 
agreement between Red Hat and Microsoft to collaborate in support of 
mutual customers who are running the other company's operating system on 
its hypervisor.

Secondly, any entity providing certified Red Hat software without our 
explicit authorization is either violating the Red Hat End User License 
Agreement or providing an alternate Linux distribution. These alternate 
distributions will impact your customer in the events that the support 
services, third party hardware and software certifications would no 
longer be valid.

As a matter of fact, the merit of Open Source makes the product with 
better performance, more scalability, and more security. We understand 
that this development and business model may be extremely threatening to 
legacy proprietary software companies, and therefore, misconceptions 
concerning our model are often propagated.

We hope that this information helps to address some of these 
misconceptions that your customers might have, and we will be happy to 
answer any questions that you may have. In the future if any of your 
customer is approached by competitors with support for Red Hat Software, 
please escalate the same to us so that we can jointly clarify.

cheers,

Bryan Yeung,
Channel Manager,
Red Hat
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