Inhouse Linux support not viable in the long run?

At first I was thinking "yeah yeah, another sales pitch":

Quoting: On Oracle's support program it calls Unbreakable Linux Support, Owenby said its biggest value proposition is "premier backporting", a service which isolates and patches individual bugs on a customer's Linux installation.

Most vendors choose the "easy path" of simply upgrading the OS version, which tends to introduce even more bugs, rather than lower the bug count, said Owenby."

And then I remember the Ubuntu thread, where they're more into jamming new blingy crud into Ubuntu than bug fixing, and in fact make it clear that Real Ubunuts Don't Fix Bugs. So...yeah.

New always has bugs. Debian and Red Hat (my two fave servers) are great about backporting new fixes for old bugs, and the older their distros get the more stable they get. You might not want to push Red Hat for its entire 7-year support cycle, but you can run the old one for a while until the bugs in the new one have been quieted down. Ubuntu would be like that in theory, but of course you have to actually squash bugs for it to be applicable. :|

Have you read Ozment & Schecter's "Milk or Wine": http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~stuart/papers/usenix06.pdf ?

Contrary to the usual corporate development manager, it looks like a given software system has only a finite number of bugs.

Of course, "The Business" in any corporation is probably incapable of describing exactly what system the development manager should produce, so I guess it's a moot point.