Seeking Commerical Telephone Support for FreeBSD?

Dave H3 asks: " Does anyone know of any U.S. based firms that provide up to 24/7 telephone support for FreeBSD? I've been tasked with submitting a business proposal to list at least three potential, established, vendors. Other than Windriver I've not had much luck. I've checked several FreeBSD sites, including FreeBSD.org, to no avail."

Comments

Re:Can one make a good living as a FreeBSD guy?

[akharon]

There aren't that many jobs out there where you can learn one thing and say you can earn a living off of it. Not NT, not Cisco, not anything. Of course, there are exceptions, but you really need to learn half a dozen things to be a well-rounded admin, and that's what's truely valuable to a company, because then you can adapt to changes in technology much easier.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Arandir]

For the sake on folks thinking of choosing FreeBSD and OpenBSD to learn *nix, PLEASE REPLY with your thoughts on the future of FreeBSD.

What systems are going to be popular five, ten, twenty years from now? Nobody knows. So don't learn a specific system. Learn the general concepts and skills that WILL be useful in five, ten or twenty years.

My opinion is that as long as there are Unix and unix-like operating systems, there will be a BSD.

Am I wasting my time to learn it if I want a job or to run a home server or to develop software for some companies server "back end"?

If I had to hire one systems administrator and there were two applicants, one who knew only Linux and the other who know both Linux and FreeBSD, I would choose the second one every time. The last kind of person I would want to hire is someone who only knew one way of doing things.

So learn both systems. They're free. In the process you will discover which one you prefer. Make that one your primary system. But keep the other around on another partition. Having immediate access to more than one operating system is invaluable when it comes to software development. As for myself, I'm using both Slackware and FreeBSD, and after two years I still can't decide between the two.

I'm a programmer getting into *nix -- but not sure which one.

So don't get into "one" *nix, get into *nix itself. Generalists always have an advantage over specialists in times of change. And as history teaches, change is constant :-)