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Winemaker Drinks To Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Australian winemaker De Bortoli is a firm believer in Linux. CIO Bill Robertson says he's 'bemused by any notion that Linux is poorly supported in the enterprise since he has never had any trouble finding support for De Bortoli's open-source systems', and says that those IT managers having trouble simply 'aren't looking hard enough.' There are also some other good case studies here -- telecommuncations provider TransACT, online hotel booking service Wotif, engineering contractor Coates and investment and funds management group Aviva."
I don't doubt the ability of Linux to be everything a company needs to run their software. After all, it is based on Unix, which was designed for ease of use, and has been standardized upon across many industries. Linux is absolutely a useful operating system, a great, working cog in the networks across the world.
But support is one of those things that ought not be something that ought to be sought "hard". Support should be easily purchased from service companies dedicated to the task. Support should be available from any number of certified engineers who have made it a priority to understand the system. Support should not be intricately tied to Google (though it certainly has its place there), but rather it should be supported by professionals.
And really, in all but the most remote locations, it is. Linux isn't difficult to put into place because support is difficult to find. On the contrary, it is easy to find companies willing to provide support. The drawback is that typically these services come at a price higher than similar service contracts with Microsoft support professionals.
Then again, you get what you pay for.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
This is a crappy case study amounting to little more information than "Company A uses Linux well for what they do." If this is a real case study it should go into details not just "hey it works."
If this is supposedly marketing then show me a case study for a company using X and I can find one for a company using it's competition Y.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
"and says that those IT managers having trouble simply 'aren't looking hard enough.'"
word!
Yes, it's a pain in the ass to go on IRC or users groups or read, post and interact with people, learning sucks,.. and it's hard too.
just someone, make it work for me.
"...those IT managers having trouble simply 'aren't looking hard enough.'"
Isn't that EXACTLY the point of buying from a vendor? So that I can EASILY and QUICKLY get the support I need WITHOUT HAVING TO LOOK FOR IT?!?
I can see the MS and Sun and IBM ad campaigns next week..
"Choose XXXX because our support staff is a phonecall away, 24/7x365... Or make sure you have a good newsgroup feed and bookmark all the good OSS sites because that's your other option!"
Ugh. With friends like this wino, who needs enemeis?
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
I don't really understand your post, but I'll agree that support is overrated. My place of employment is a Windows/Novell shop. My boss is scared of anything that isn't commercial (he even considers "shareware" to be "on par" with freeware) because he can't buy support for it.
Meanwhile, we have several applications that we (by requirement) bought from the lowest bidder. I've spent many a day and night trying to get ahold of a competent support person (even when we've paid big bucks for onsite service with a <24-hour response time!!), without luck. We've had such bad service with commercial support that we usually end farking around with it until we get it fixed (or not), just as we would with unsupported software.
Meanwhile, with open source (and even Microsoft) solutions I can go on Google and type in my problem and be given a list of possible resolutions.
Don't even get me started with the idea of pre-paid support dollars, which my boss is also a huge fan of (thanks to rigid budgets). I can't count how many times we've been ripped off by that concept. It seems like it's almost better to get screwed out of money than it is to have a number in the budget that isn't set in stone.
Open source support may suck, but commercial support sucks at least as much.
The thing about support of Open Source Software is that quality support demands above all else a stable product. No, not one that doesn't crash very often, one that doesn't change very often. Every change a programmer makes to a program introduces a risk of retraining for the support staff. The last thing a customer wants to hear from Technical Support is "your programmers changed the source and that's why it doesn't work any more.".
That's why it's important for enterprises to keep programmers away from the programs unless the company is prepared to support itself. This is not a problem for proprietary software because the programmers don't have the source code. For open source, though, the temptation to "change that routine so it works better in our environment" is pretty overwhelming and absolutely toxic to the support scenario.
The vast majority of applications are built to run on Windoze, deego. Just because he wants to bring some half decent applications that were built for the Windows OS to the Linux kernel doesn't make him "less of a believer."
Imitation is the best kind of praise you can get. If there's applications for Windows that are being ported to or being given some form of compatibility with Linux, it speaks for both the application and the OS as being worthy of each other.
To each his own.
Yes, and they also have minimum wage skills. Finding quality windows admins is more dificult than finding good *NIX admins. Neither work cheap either.
The thing is, your customers were basically right. Your (former?) belief that support contracts are a waste of money because the customers rarely if ever call on Microsoft/Sun/Novell ignores the main reason why someone gets a support contract: it's a hedge against their systems failing. It's like claiming that fire insurance is a waste of money because fires are extremely rare. Yes, they're rare, but if you have a fire and don't have insurance, you are SOL.
All the posts here about how newsgroups, IRC, and Google searches provide all the support they need is irrelevent. Support is insurance. They're paying somebody to be an expert in case something bad happens, so if they can't figure it out themselves (maybe after doing some searches on Google etc.) somebody will come in and fix it.
Note that I'm not saying that all support contracts are good investments, or making any claim about the quality of support. I'm talking about the motivation for having them.