IT Departments - How Are You Supporting Your OS Code?

ZMan asks: "A lot of IS groups are using Open Source tools (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc...) to build cost effective and reliable IT infrastructures for their companies. Upper and executive management wants to know how these tools will be supported since their isn't one single commercial entity that does by default (ie. Microsoft). So, what does your IS group do? Do you hire staff with the expertise to do support in-house or out source all your support to a third party? Or something else?" You've got the source, why not find someone who can care for it, be it an employee, or contractor?

Comments

The old fashioned way

[linuxwrangler]

Pay someone...

Seriously, four points need to be made to management.

One. Relying on a single vendor is every bit as dangerous as building a stock "portfolio" with just one stock. Diversity is good.

Two. Support exists - you might try compiling a list of support options. Include both the free (newsgroups, web sites, etc.) and the not free (list the consulting companies that specialize in the software you use).

Three. Big vendor and single vendor are not the same as good support. One need merely read the Gripe Line column in InfoWorld to see how shabby the (often very expensive) "support" is from many large and supposedly solid and reputable companies.

Four. The right to use the code indefinitely prevents abuse by vendors. It is no fun investing lots of effort building systems (code you develop and own) only to have a vendor pull the rug out from under you when they cease supporting or selling a product or when they switch licensing schemes to make continued use unaffordable.

Re:The old fashioned way

[sydb]

Three. Big vendor and single vendor are not the same as good support. One need merely read the Gripe Line column in InfoWorld to see how shabby the (often very expensive) "support" is from many large and supposedly solid and reputable companies.

You're right there. I have had a lot of dealings with IBM support lately, and though I like them as a company, their support simply stinks.

For instance, I had a problem with WebSphere which has a command line tool called WSCP. WebSphere keeps it's configuration information in a RDBMS repository. I had a lot of problems with corruption of this repository when doing 'incorrect' things using WSCP. These 'incorrect' things are the kind of things which you would expect to receive an error message for.

This corruption meant a drop of the RDBMS tables and either a rebuild of the config from scratch or a restore and import of the config which had previously been exported to a text file. When your DBAs are a different team and there are 'processes and procedures' to get them to do any work, dropping tables can be long-winded.

IBM's answer? Don't do that!

I spent several weeks dealing with level 2 support before escalating this to someone who saw my perspective on the issue. No fix yet (after another week).

The latest version of WebSphere, fortunately, uses XML files for it's configuration repository... but my company won't be using that for a couple of years...

Re:The old fashioned way

[sydb]

I should also say:

One. Relying on a single vendor is every bit as dangerous as building a stock "portfolio" with just one stock. Diversity is good.

Management just won't see it that way. They see an infrastructure comprised of products from a single vendor as more likely to 'interoperate'... and they theorise that support will be better, as the vendor won't be able to blame some third party.

The risk you identify is of that vendor going under. But, to use the example from my other post, no-one thinks IBM is about to fold. That would be a 'steady performer' in your stock portfolio.

But if you can convince management to use Free Software, then you are right, as that particular risk is not important, as long as someone else is available to take over support and maintenance.

The acid test of all ideas is 'convincing management'...

Re:The old fashioned way

[jason_watkins]

>One. Relying on a single vendor is every bit as dangerous as building a stock "portfolio" with just one stock. Diversity is good.

There's something you're glossing over. For the most part, stocks values are distinct. While a global factor may affect all stocks to some extent, typically the rise or fall of a single stock has a very limited influence on the other stocks in your portfolio. IE, if netscape tanks, it likely won't dent say General Mills.

With solutions however, this isn't always the case. Often a single failure among the componants will bring the entire solution down. This is what makes management nervous, and it's justified and good; don't slam them for it. The way you mitigate this is you make the slices between componants fall on standardized protocols or interfaces. Ie, if MySQL starts to bog or takes a development path away from what you want, if you do things right, it should be quite simple to switch to PostgreSQL or oracle.

So keep that in mind, diversification and combination are not nessisarily the same, and you need to balance the issues.

Many of these companies do sell support

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL does offer support if you wish to pay for it. It even comes in two forms, standard and advanced.

PHP support is also available from Zend, and some is even included when you purchase one of their products.

It may not be one unified source, but if you're using Oracle software, you wouldn't expect MS to support it would you?

If your in Europe

[sydb]

Cendio in Sweden and OpenCare both provide support for Free Software packages for a fee. OpenCare also have offices in the States and Asia but are based in France.

what counts as support?

[Anonymous Coward]

many commercial "support" contracts exist to generate extra revenue while fullfilling customer management checkbox requirements. you call them up for support and report a problem and they say "yep, that's a bug; try paying us for this new version which will require downtime to upgrade and it might or might not be fixed."

Too Many Choices to Waste Time 'Supporting'

[mchappee]

Our IT staff uses Linux-based solutions to handle everything from file servers to user workstations to huge Oracle database servers. Most of the solutions are "mundane", which is good, but others can be pretty tricky. Either way we very seldom have to spend time "supporting" them. The only thing they do is work. Work, work, work.

Another aspect of Open Source solutions is the number of choices. For example, look at Mail Transport Agents. If I'm having trouble with sendmail, I can use Postfix. If Postfix is not for me, I'll use exim. Whatever. Same thing with web servers. My point is that competition is alive and well in the OSS community. Competition means better docs, responsive authors, and a vibrant (if flammable) user community. That's where you'll find the best support, and it won't cost you $1.95 per minute.

In some instances a hack is necessary to get the job done. Case in point, I had to hack Gnumeric to make it print a sheet without bringing it into view. In essence, I made it a command-line utility for printing Gnumeric spreadsheets. Like a good little OSS supporter I submitted my changes to the list. They were very kind, helpful, and supportive. It didn't make it into the main tree, but that was my own fault. Even though they weren't interested in it themselves, they still took time to help. That was cool.

Damn, what a ramble.

Matthew

Microsoft `Support'

[Dunkirk]

Every time I hear somebody talking about getting `support' from Microsoft, I have to really wonder about how clueful they are. I'm a programmer / backup admin for a very large Fortune 500 company. I only recently moved into programming from doing the Unix and backup NT administration in the core data center group. I was good friends with all of the main NT support guys and all of the intranet developers (where we use all Windows-based stuff).

In all the years I've done development and administration, I've called them on a per-incident basis 4 times, and they've only been able to solve the problem twice. And I've NEVER heard people talking about getting support from Microsoft. In all the problems we have, with all the Microsoft products we use: Win2K, WinNT, Exchange, IIS, SQL Server, SMS, and all the attendent stuff, I've NEVER heard of anyone else even calling Microsoft.

Our attitude, in a company of over 30,000 employees is basically this: if it ain't workin', reinstall. And I think that's basically Microsoft's answer to most problems as well, based on the limited contact I've had with them.

Sure there's a guy that has an MSDN subscription, but he doesn't do front line work. The main dude is a young guy and he tries very hard, but he never called Microsoft while I was working in the core group, and he was VERY green around the gills. (And don't get me wrong. I know my way around; I was offered the team lead spot. And, I was offered the job he had before he came to work for us, though I never told him that.) We don't budget for it. Not only that, but I have had to almost beg my bosses for every call I've made to Microsoft.

What I'm trying to say is that this `big company' doesn't even have Microsoft support on the radar. What are people talking about when it comes to this? I know you can buy support packages, but we don't. We just allow ourselves to be extorted by Microsoft (yes, we took the bait on the latest `upgrade now or pay full price later' gimmick) and then take comfort in the fact they're a big company with `good support.' But after paying millions of dollars every year for licenses - despite being on the best Select schedule you can be on - we never take advantage of it.

I suspect most other companies, unless their *primary* business is software development or IT consulting - don't either, and IT workers who would like to see open source alternatives get a fair shake should try to do what they can to point out this discrepancy. Just because the CIO is reading this kind of nonsense in Information Week don't make it so.

Re:Microsoft `Support'

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I hear somebody talking about getting `support' from Microsoft, I have to really wonder about how clueful they are. ... And I've NEVER heard people talking about getting support from Microsoft.

So you don't often wonder about how clueful people are?

Documentation Documentation Documentation

[cow ninja]

When writing inhouse applications or when building something with unsupported tools documentation is key. If your code is commented and you keep a "Journal" as you go someone else will/should be able to pick up where you left off. This is common coding practice.

There is commercial support for most OSS products

[trajano]

Most OSS (and OSS based) products do have commercial support that you can take advantage of. You just need to do some research first.

e.g.
* RedHat Linux you can get support from RedHat.
* Postgresql, I am pretty sure I saw one in their web site.
* Perl, ActiveState
* IHS -- IBM's Apache, supported by IBM

Basically go to the web site and see what they have in terms of commercial support. Then set up a support contract with them. This should keep managers happy. At the same time, you can add another source of support aside from news groups and the web even if you do use it more than the paid one.

Start One

[Ashell]

All said and done it is rare that you wil find an Opensource product not supported .there will always be people ready to help you out if you know how to ask ?

A different way of thinking

[tchuladdiass]

Instead of treating OS products like you would commercial code, internally you put it in the same catagory as in-house developed code. So, however you support in-house stuff, use the same methods for OS code.

change the suffix

[Triumph The Insult C]

eg, sendmail.com vs sendmail.org