Linux Usage in the UK

pdajames writes "Techies don't seem to understand that businesses want to have a support contract with their usual supplier before they will buy Linux, even though the likelihood is that they may never need support. A survey in the UK showed that support concerns were the No. 1 factor keeping companies from investing in open source software."

Comments

No issues here

[Richard_at_work]

I can never see the problem, at my place the only support contract we have is for the AIX server. We have a liberal number of OpenBSD and linux boxes around the business, all running semi critical and critical systems, and we have no support contracts. All of it is handled inhouse by moi, we have redundant backup systems, and a good backup procedure. Any issues i get that i cant resolve, i can usually find a good answer from mailing lists, google or IRC. Seriously, how many of these same people have support contracts for their Windows systems?

Re:No issues here

[sydb]

Seriously, how many of these same people have support contracts for their Windows systems?

What we're talking about here is places like my day job, where we have someone from Microsoft on-site full time. I was most upset when I found out, I mean, how pathetic, but there you are.

Support matters when you're a large company who is in it "for the long run" as I've been told.

Yes, we use Linux, but we have support from the supplier (SuSE just now, RedHat to come).

I can't implement software without a support contract! Isn't it insane? I was going to install a little GPL'd FTP proxy because our Microsoft proxies were failing, first thing management ask is "where's the support coming from?" Heh, a couple of hundred lines of C but it needs supported.

Re:No issues here

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the crux of the problem:

All of it is handled inhouse by moi

Organisations absolutely, positively hate this. "Single point of failure". They piss you off, you quit and get a better job, you get killed in a bizarre gardening act, and they are up shit creek.

Unfortunately, this is also an attitude taken by lots of Admins as well (Windows and Unix, I will state). The "fuck off and leave me alone" attitude that many them put forward when asked questions. The inability or unwillingness to document what they've done ("Say, how do we re-install the sendmail installation if we have to?" "Fuck off and leave me alone").

I have seen many an office who will stick with middle-of-the-road software, even though they figure there's better stuff, because they don't want to risk the chance of getting fucked over by this.

This is why they want support contracts, this is why they use windows. "well, if Jim Bob dies, we'll just get the support folks to help us until we get someone else", or the (perhaps false sense of) security of "every here knows windows, we can fix things ourselves without Jim Bob"

Re:Who needs support

[Duncan3]

Good lord man, that's not even funny in the Linux reality distortion field.

It's an excuse...

[heironymouscoward]

Developer: I'd like to use Linux for this project.

Manager: I'll check with our suppliers to see if they support Linux.

Suppliers: hahahaha.

Manager: sorry, developer, company policy is clear: no support, no project.

Developer: COM+ gnash MTS splutter IIS damnation.

Hey...

[Pinguu]

the UK has computers now?

I blame the British 'techie' environment.

[Peter Cooper]

I think the main reason British is such an 'open source third world country' is because of the techie environment here. In regular schools, all you learn about is Microsoft, Microsoft and Microsoft. Why? Because Microsoft supplies the schools and makes money from the schools.

I have a lot of friends who are techies who came through the 'proper' way. That is, they were educated at college, did courses, and got qualifications. They're good guys, but when it comes to solving something, IIS and VBScript are almost the only two solutions!

One friend of mine was whining that he needed to build a new server and migrate and mirror data over to it. I suggested using an NFS server. This isn't rocket science, but concepts like these are unknown to the millions of lower-end techies in the UK. Why? Because Microsoft is #1. I know a lot of people studying for MCSEs, yet they're barely computer literate. They can get around in Windows 2000 or XP, but throw them at any command prompt (even DOS) and they balk.

UNIX and its variants just aren't considered cool within the larger techie environment in the UK. Microsoft has very deep roots here, unlike in the US technical fraternity, and most UK techies are so stupid they won't leave what they know.

I can't really venture as to the exact reasons for this... but perhaps it's because the British are used to doing things one way. I mean, we only had a single national telecoms provider, a single national gas provider, and a single national postal service until ten years ago. Therefore, when schools only show that Microsoft is the way.. the average Brit will nod and use it.

Another problem is the lack of decent IT education in schools. There are very few 'computer clubs' in UK schools, and those that do exist are only there for allowing kids to perhaps do something in Pascal under Windows, or to do their regular homework in Microsoft Works.

UK schools need to be more open, like US schools. US schools often give budgets to their computer clubs.. I mean, look at the Ask Slashdot thread the other day.. they ponied up $4000 for the guy to build a server system and get some connectivity. What a learning curve his computer club will have!

In the UK, by comparison, everything is so bureaucratic and purchases are so decided 'by the local education authority' that any choice other than Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft is effectively vetoed.

Personally I think this is great, because people who DO know Linux, who DO understand Computer Science properly and who DON'T have MCSEs, get rewarded reasonably well in the UK! But.. the knowledge just isn't there, and while Microsoft gets rammed down the wanna-be British techie's throat, Microsoft will prevail.

IBM does sell support.

[Anonymous Coward]

And they have for years.

IBM will sell you worldwide, 24x7x365 support for Linux.

Sounds like a Business Opportunity to me

[Ridgelift]

Techies don't seem to understand that businesses want to have a support contract with their usual supplier before they will buy Linux

Can you say "business opportunity"? I now only install and support only Linux solutions (I don't do Windows anymore - I have other "grunts" with MCSE's who do that for cheap). The sell is simply two points 1) Open Source products use Open Standards, which will interoperate with anything. 2) The business decision to keep, update or upgrade company software is back in the software buyer's hands. If you want to keep your software, or hire someone to [fix|add] features, or upgrade to the latest version - it's their choice.

The Redmond camp keeps hammering on the point that Linux doesn't have support. So hammer back on those two points: open standard interoperabilty, and the return of the business decision. It really shakes people up to realise they _do_ have a choice, and that Microsoft is not the safest choice anymore.

the focus on "support concerns" is rather ironic

[vnv]

Considering that with closed source software, over 80% of the total cost of "business software" today is essentially "support", it is ironic that this is the concern of those moving to open source.

According to the recently discussed Business Week article,

"Analysts estimate business-software customers spend $5 installing and fixing their software for every $1 they spend on software."

If anything, open source will lower support costs as you can get support from more sources at a wider range of price points.

With a global support base of people with the same software, open source will rapidly lower support costs. Today people get far more information and many times higher quality information on problems via the net than they do from a manufacturer.

And beyond support, you can now directly hire people to work on the software changes you need to make your business work. That means you don't have to wait years for your vendor to listen to you. In today's hyper-competitive global business market, the time you save may be the difference between your business succeeding or failing.

All in all, open source is a giant win for business. Hopefully we can soon move past the incredible amount of FUD the closed source vendors are promulgating in the market.

It isn't about "support".

[Anonymous Coward]

"Support" is just the name they give to their fear.

They are afraid to use Linux because Linux hasn't achieved the market dominance they feel comfortable with.

If Linux had 51% of the desktop market, they'd feel comfortable with the risk of having their current Linux support person/company becoming unavailable.

This is about fear. You cannot remove fear with facts.

But who cares? The businesses that have people who can evaluate the risks and benefits will make the jump first. And they will reap the rewards.

As each year passes, more companies will feel comfortable enough to switch.

Don't sweat the "support" issue. Support is readily available and easily found. But pointing that out will not end stories such as these.

This is about fear.

Supportability

[The Monster]

Heh, a couple of hundred lines of C but it needs supported.

I work for the technical support department of my company. Our software was originally sold and serviced by independent vendors, many of which have since been acquired by the company itself. One of the things that makes support difficult is the high configurability of both the application itself and the underlying OS most often used (a flavor of Unix) make it easy for people to write utilities to expedite various common functions, to install system daemons that launch from different-named init scripts,.... When I come across problems at sites that were inherited from the sundry vendors, each of which had its own notion of the right way to do things, I must often waste precious time figuring out the intricacies of these 'couple of hundred lines', which are not documented in any way.

I have become one of those people who writes a 'couple of hundred lines' here or there (gradually assembling a package of tools that I upload to servers whenever possible) but as I am painfully aware of the Dark Side of infinite customizability, I have gone out of my way to document my work.

1. I write everything to Bourne shell, sed, awk, grep & Co., even though it might be easier to use perl or compile to binary. Even using a Korn shell is something I've avoided because I want my work to be understandable to as many people as possible.
2. I make liberal use of comments within the scripts to explain what I'm doing and why.
3. My scripts respond to -h, --help, or anything remotely resembling either, with some, uh, help, which includes my work email address.
4. I've set up a documentation web page on a server on our intranet so that if anyone has questions, they can see what's supposed to be happening here, why, and how.
5. If you don't know that my utilities exist, or they haven't been installed on a site yet, you can get by without them. They in no way intrude upon the functioning of the system so as to be required (as your proxy is).
6. I've tried to educate others in my department about how these tools can be used, how they fit together,

And, even though I have the support of at least two levels of management above me in the org chart, I'm STILL concerned that someone high enough up the food chain will some day declare my little skunkworks project officially Evil and ban it, if for no reason other than the notion that nobody but I understand it well enough to keep up with the changes that will inevitably be required. What happens if I get hit by the proverbial bus, or just take a better job somewhere else?

For example, I wrote a utility to get around something our software people had done that makes logged-in users of our thin client software not show up in a who or w. My utility shows those users as well as the ordinary who/w output, and I just found out yesterday that the latest upgrade to our core product changes the rules yet again, requiring me to slightly rewrite the utility to keep it working with all variations of our software and the two main flavors of Unix it runs on.

There is plenty good reason to not want people to become dependent on my tools being in place, since there is no guarantee that we can make the institutional commitment to maintaining them, even though I have plenty of happy customers and support techs who love what I've empowered them to do. I can only hope that the Guys in the Ties will recognize that deriving this much value from my work demands that we make that commitment, rather than abandon it as 'unsupportable'.