What bad incentives do support based models lead to?
There are 3 different aspects here: 1. you're selling support 2. the customer is using the support 3. it's open source, so anybody can sell support
So in order to be profitable, you want to maximize your income (1.) and minimize your expenses (2.), that is, sell lots of support for software whose quality is good enough that the customers rarely have to actually call the support hotline.
But if the customer does call the support hotline you have to ensure that the support they get is top quality, otherwise they'll take advantage of 3. and leave for your competitor (note, "we'll support ourselves in-house based on the upstream release" is effectively another competitor here).
Another point: there are multiple levels of support, and different organizations can cooperate to provide the full package; at the lowest level you tell the end user to check if the computer is powered on; at the higher levels you root-cause and fix bugs and implement new features, which is where you can really market expertise with specific projects.
Of course you're right to point out that you're limited to enterprise clients; I haven't heard of any success with selling support to consumers.
>What bad incentives do support based models lead to?
Entirely useless projects that would not stand independent scrutiny, but are sold through several inefficient management layers by salesmen with the guarantee that "at least we support it".
Out of curiosity, how big was your organization before the support model you're describing took off? What sort of product was it? I would love to learn more about how this works in practice for companies besides red hat
There are 3 different aspects here: 1. you're selling support 2. the customer is using the support 3. it's open source, so anybody can sell support
So in order to be profitable, you want to maximize your income (1.) and minimize your expenses (2.), that is, sell lots of support for software whose quality is good enough that the customers rarely have to actually call the support hotline.
But if the customer does call the support hotline you have to ensure that the support they get is top quality, otherwise they'll take advantage of 3. and leave for your competitor (note, "we'll support ourselves in-house based on the upstream release" is effectively another competitor here).
Another point: there are multiple levels of support, and different organizations can cooperate to provide the full package; at the lowest level you tell the end user to check if the computer is powered on; at the higher levels you root-cause and fix bugs and implement new features, which is where you can really market expertise with specific projects.
Of course you're right to point out that you're limited to enterprise clients; I haven't heard of any success with selling support to consumers.