<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <big><big><big>Dearest Partners, </big> <big>Driven by the fact that few of your customers have been approached by our competitors with support for Red Hat Software (binaries, upgrades, patches, fixes, etc), we are writing to clarify the confusions that might occur with the sales/renewal process. </big></big> </big> Firstly, we understand that customers are confused if our competitors are authorized or under contract with Red Hat to provide support for Red Hat products. With the exception of certain hardware OEMs (such as IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) and a few other select Red Hat partners, Red Hat has not authorized any other company to provide support for Red Hat products. In particular, we do not have an agreement with Novell nor Oracle to provide support for Red Hat solutions. The only exception is a limited agreement between Red Hat and Microsoft to collaborate in support of mutual customers who are running the other company’s operating system on its hypervisor. <big> <big> Secondly, any entity providing certified Red Hat software without our explicit authorization is either violating the Red Hat End User License Agreement or providing an alternate Linux distribution. These alternate distributions </big><big>will impact your customer in the events that the support services, </big><big>third party hardware and software certifications would no longer be valid. </big> <big> </big> <big> As a matter of fact, the merit of Open Source makes the product with better performance, more scalability, and more security. We understand that this development and business model may be extremely threatening to legacy proprietary software companies, and therefore, misconceptions concerning our model are often propagated.</big> <big> </big> <big> We hope that this information helps to address some of these misconceptions that your customers might have, and we will be happy to answer any questions that you may have. In the future if any of your customer is approached by competitors with support for Red Hat Software, please escalate the same to us so that we can jointly clarify. </big> <big>cheers, Bryan Yeung, Channel Manager, Red Hat </big></big> </body> </html>