Point is, if you work for some big corp, when you buy something, you want proper warranties meaning people to blame if it breaks down. I have seen corps want to pay for stuff available free just so they can point at someone if there’s a problem. Ubuntu is mostly fine, Canonical does offer support, but “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
The enterprise support also means security updates, which is a huge requirement for government contract work (not just US, anything military really). I’ve also seen requirements for use of DISA approved products. I think at the time RHEL and maybe SUSE were the only ones on the list - I’m a few years removed from having to care about this.
RHEL gets enterprise support from RedHat / IBM.
Point is, if you work for some big corp, when you buy something, you want proper warranties meaning people to blame if it breaks down. I have seen corps want to pay for stuff available free just so they can point at someone if there’s a problem. Ubuntu is mostly fine, Canonical does offer support, but “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
The enterprise support also means security updates, which is a huge requirement for government contract work (not just US, anything military really). I’ve also seen requirements for use of DISA approved products. I think at the time RHEL and maybe SUSE were the only ones on the list - I’m a few years removed from having to care about this.