I'm guessing that a lot of companies out there have a comercial Unix distribution. Why would they do this if they can get Linux and BSD for free? What is the benefit?

SUPPORT, SUPPORT and SUPPORT. That's what redhat does. By paying you get autoupdates, security patches, warranty and more stability.

you get autoupdates using apt and cron, security patches in the apt repositories, and the most stability out of Debian. Support and warranty are the only things missing, and you can purchase 3rd party support

that is the point. you still have to PAY for the support. Also with debian, they take a lot longer then most distros to get patches out. example is debian is still on the 2.6.11 kernel with the rest of the world on 2.6.14...

dont get me wrong i love debian, it is my distro of choice, but it is so stable because they take an extremely long time to test things before they put stuff in the apt repositories.

RHE on the other hand allows you to pay for all kinds of supports and you get priority downloads on security patches and updates.

So yes why people can get Linux and FreeBSD for free, they do not get any kind of real support other then web based like this forum, or your local LUG. When you buy UNIX or AIX or what ever you get real world phone support, 24/7 onsite support if you pay for it, etc... this is part of BUYING their product you are getting everything you could want from hardware, to phone, to e-mail, to onsite help, etc... for a price tag. To a lot of companies this is worth it as by the time their initial contract expires, they hope, their IT staff will be skilled enough to deal with 99% of problems and they know they can make a phone call, pay a fee, and get support ASAP to fix a major problem.

I conceed, you make a good point. However, why wouldn't someone choose to only pay for the support as opposed to the packaged CDs, instruction manual's, advertising, etc. that a company like RedHat charges for(in the price of the product).

Because in the real networking world. Networks behave a lot different. You see many different problems than one would see at home. Plus, with support an admin has someone to rely on. There is not a single admin out there that knows everything. Everyone needs help from time to time plus production networks works mean money. Money means uptime and downtime is not good. When all else fails you contact support.

Then there is new rollouts. Hardware work arounds, viruses, worms, and many other problems.

You get stability, performance and scalability.

Wow. Are you in sales and marketing

I wish, our sales team always does "telework" but I think they just sit at home and eat their hoho's But anyways it is the truth. Linux is great but when it comes to mission critical apps, I would still choose sun/solaris server.

yeah the larger the network grows the more things are app to go wrong or down a path not forseen. for anything small (under 200 users) i can handle MOST things that would arise, but even after the years of working in networks i STILL make calls or read books or web pages to get answerers for things i can not figure out in a timely fashion. time being the key word there. given time all things are able to be addressed by 1 person or a small group, but when time = money, you do not always have the luxury of taking that time to figure things out.

make a phone call to that company you pay support for and cut your troubleshooting time down drastically is money well spent.

[p.s] i love the spell check button on this forum.