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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?
>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.