> One thing I don't understand is why companies don't pay Canonical for support? Is it such a bad thing to pay for Linux support?

I've never needed paid professional linux support. Or windows support. Or mac support. Or android support or any of that.

I think the issue is...once you develop enough in-house Linux knowledge you don't really derive a benefit from paying for support.

Tbh, the only kind of "linux support" I'd really want is overnight sysadmin support so I don't get calls at 3am. I suspect that isn't the kind of support you have in mind.

All software has bugs, and professional end users often hit edge case bugs that affect few others.

Do you push fixes for these back into your distribution (or upstream and cherry-pick into the distribution, etc), or do you maintain your own private repositories containing your modifications?

If you do the latter, then you have extra maintenance costs. If you pay for support from a distribution vendor, then you save that cost. Even if you have the expertise to do everything yourself, it still costs you time (and therefore money). Working with a distribution vendor amortizes that time between all of their customers, saving everyone money.

> All software has bugs, and professional end users often hit edge case bugs that affect few others.

I'm kind of amused by the implication that I'm not a professional end user.

> Do you push fixes for these back into your distribution (or upstream and cherry-pick into the distribution, etc), or do you maintain your own private repositories containing your modifications?

Or maybe, y'know, a third option where one picks software that is highly reliable for your use case.

You are suggesting a very false choice. If you have unique needs that frequently cause you to encounter edge case issues, you need someone in house who can fix those on your timetable and not a vendor's.

Nope. Not at all.

Backporting upstream patches by request, enhancing upstream, help debugging difficult, multi-level issues and so on. I also took it for granted but seeing what I see today, I understand.

> Backporting upstream patches by request, enhancing upstream, help debugging difficult, multi-level issues and so on. I also took it for granted but seeing what I see today, I understand.

I guess to me if you don't have the expertise in-house as a tech company, I think you have issues because you are outsourcing core competencies [the ability compile & maintain linux related software, the ability to debug complex issues that are likely part of generating your competitive advantage in someway].

There are silent corruption bugs in storage drivers for example. Having that kind of competency in-house is too expensive for most companies.(Not Spotify in this case, but problem could be much harder to fix)

http://labs.spotify.com/2013/01/28/finding-the-right-needle-...

That is the description of a hardware problem that the vendor they bought the hardware from was unable to resolve due to an unsupported OS.

That is where picking the right hardware vendor comes in. I wouldn't ask my OS vendor to support my hardware choices unless they specifically certified it. Neither Debian or Ubuntu certified that raid card...which puts you back to square 1 again, rendering their support moot.