Point made hahaha

OK so further devil's advocate.

You've said this is a client. You know these details, which aren't rocket science and do make sense. My quandary here is also due to my inexperience, firstly with both of RHEL and CentOS as well as what you're doing for this client. But my wonderment here is "Don't YOU know?" I mean seriously, you're bringing up this point because it would seem that a client or multiple clients ask this question. Meanwhile I'm guessing you know a lot about RHEL and CentOS. You're mentioning that a client allowed their subscription to expire. My question therefore would be whether or not you explain the trade offs related to the costs of support.

1. They have RHEL now, which means they paid for it and likely they paid some good money for it. Finally they probably have more than one system using it
2. They're now sitting here trying to determine whether or not it's worth their money to continue to pay for support, but yet they're paying you to maintain their systems?
3. It would seem to me that if you have an installed base of anything, especially something you originally paid for; that it would be several levels of problems to entirely change all that to another OS, configure it properly, and deal with the learning curve on the part of the client. In short, the technology may be free, but your time is not and likewise their time to tolerate the change is also not free.

Well, this particular one let their subscription expire BEFORE I started doing anything for them, so I was already behind the eight ball with them.

But as I stated in my original post, "Playing devil's advocate here for a lively debate", key words "lively debate", which I think this thread has become a good (and surprisingly entertaining) discussion.

And yes, I know the downfalls of not having it that are in this thread already, but, you learn something new every day as the saying goes, maybe my new thing will come from this thread.

I've absolutely been there, originally wrote some of this, but erased it due to "going on and on" but I'll relate and try to be simple.

Yep, with the pull away of support for XP, we got some clients frantically looking to get their applications upgraded to match with Win7/8. Some of them used hyperterm by the way and we had to point out that W7/8 (eh-ehm!!) doesn't happen to have a terminal program. Similarly there were dev licenses for things like tools which long expired or other stuff. So ... you quote them the big cost, because that was in their request all the while hearing from them that "there's not much budget for this".

The bottom line is they're either willing and able to pay, or they're not. Many's the time I've encountered clients EXACTLY like this where their impression of upgrading their application to Windows 7 is "the cost of a new computer containing Windows 7", forget any time/etc to pay the development house they've engaged to solve this little problem. So thankfully in my case we have an owner as well as a Sales and BD guy who sit there and say "So they don't want to pay anything for this one-time job? ...." They merely redirect their attention back to their screen and I can tell the discussion is over.

You have to decide if they're worth your time. And I know, if it's just you and many times "work is work", but ...

The fun of end of support for XP was (heck, still is for some clients) a special time haha.

Thanks for the replies. And good point about the quality of a client. This thread is getting loaded with all kinds of gold nuggets for future folks to read.

As a mechanically inclined individual I still say don't buy a muscle car if you can't work on it (or aren't willing to learn...) F2/3rdsTW! Hu?

See no difference between, way over paying, for linux or winplows. ):