Systems engineer here, I haven't worked at a company that pays for Linux support in 12 years and this was at scale (10K+ servers). You don't need IBM or Canonical to get patches or a heads up about major vulns. Several ways to go with this but I get up to date patches for free with Debian. And I can count on my hand the number of times that any org I've been part of needed a kernel engineer or access to one. Support contracts for OS AFAIK aren't worth the money any more unless you really don't have anyone who can do system support.
Freetards? Do you make money from an OS, compiler or similar infrastructure? If not, then your employer would in my opinion be making a mistake to send $$$ to a vendor of same unless they're in a very special niche.
One of the only enduring lessons from IT history is that there's always going to come a time to move on from some technology or vendor. And IBM isn't doing wrong by trying to capture some cash but it's very late in this game and its a losing battle.
I'm guessing that it's going to be the 'legacy' cloud vendor's time soon. The markup is way out of whack.
