...as it stands, a message from your boss has the same sound and priority as the 101st guy in a "congrats!" chain.

I recall Linus saying that x86 won the position it is in not because it was technically superior, but because "that's what everyone had at home" and is even now still gradually pushing out the entrenched mainframes without really trying or any kind of focused or concerted effort.

TrueNAS is probably the newest OS I have introduced into my "home lab", and by using it for my personal infrastructure I have come to know it well from a functional perspective. Not only its value, but also it's limitations.

While I can't say that I would ever be in such a position, I know that I could unreservedly recommend TrueNAS to a small business for their onsite infrastructure, which (depending on their size and risk tolerance) would likely come with a complete purchase of official hardware, software, and support... but I guess my point is that the skills and trust directly translate from the "community version" to the corporate which just lags a bit behind.

I think that might be a good model for corporate-backed open source software. IntelliJ follows the same pattern... nothing really hindered, broken, or missing... but 'more' or 'with support' is available.

In contrast (though, not in sharp contrast) is Red Hat's RHEL operating system. I used to see this pattern everywhere, where all the devs used CentOS but the production machines were RHEL for the production, support, etc.

Then RHEL ate CentOS, so now everyone is using Rocky Linux on their workstations, often even building binaries on Rocky to deploy on the RHEL servers (bad form), but Red Hat continues to be a antagonistic against Rocky and friends with legal maneuvers... even if it is the feet that they are unknowingly standing upon.

For example, RHEL might have a CLI tool to list the contents of a repo (assuming your subscription is up to date), and I've looked it up before so I could do it again and I suppose I could learn it if necessary, but... I could get the same information by pointing my web browser at any Rocky mirror for a far easier way to discover what packages and versions are in a rhel release.

Tiny things like this bit of frictionless service (for which Rocky and the community is paying) and newcomers playing with Rocky Linux, are a direct benefit the position of Red Hat & RHEL (just not a monetized one)... which they actively fight against.

Context, then answer... instead of having everything ride on the first character (e.g. we make it pick "Y" or "N" first in response to a yes-or-no question, it usually picks "Y" even if it later talks itself out of it).

...it's just a database entry, after all.