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Paid Support Not Critical For Linux Adoption
ruphus13 writes "At the LinuxWorld expo, an analyst for the 451 Group pointed to a growing trend in enterprise — the increase in adoption of community-supported Linux distros. From the article, 'Companies are increasingly choosing free community-driven Linux distributions instead of commercial offerings with conventional support options. Several factors are driving this trend, particularly dissatisfaction with the cost of support services from the major distributors. Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell.'"
When the person giving it to you knows what they are doing. If that person actually uses the software then they probably know alot about it. This is why community-driven support works, if you manage to keep the "kiddies" out so that they don't clog up the forums with lots of repeated/redundant questions then everything goes quite smoothly. Arch Linux does a very good job of this; it's a simple distro to use for the experienced user, so you get alot of good questions being asked with lots of good answers. Community support > paid support any day.
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We can't. We suck cock, go ask the asshole-eaters.
The paid support is for businesses who can't waste their time scouring the Internet and posting in forums for solutions. Time is money, and the sooner they get the help they need, the better. The same is true for Windows. You think Microsoft doesn't have expensive paid support? Guess again. They basically have a monopoly on it, whereas with Linux, any company can support the software competently, since the source code is available.
We started with RHEL3, especially since we ordered a Dell Server and it could come with the server, thus I knew RH would just work on it. Never seemed to get my money's worth out of support (if you are going to administer it, you might as well learn it, so I answered most questions by myself.) A year or so later, instead of going RHEL4 I went to CentOS 4 next, as it had the same necessary apps and updates, support didn't matter so I had the OS without the bothersome RedHat Network license validation nag screens.
About a year after that I got tired of CentOS - when I started looking at options for a cross-platform backup solution, CentOS was the low man on the compatible distribution totem pole, sometimes not even there at all, most support requestes ended with some vague problem with dependencies and an 'oh well'.
Also learned to shy away from SuSE then too, as I noticed around that time any Novell associated projects usually dropped any non-SuSE binaries (i.e. iFolder).
But Ubuntu had just about everything there, was well updated, and a lot of forums with solutions. Granted, Ubuntu lacked the nice SAMBA admin program (GSAMBAD needs help), but I never have any problems finding apps or resolving installation issues quickly.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
How did Ubuntu get such a huge community so quickly? I remember hearing about Ubuntu shortly after I installed Xandros on my system, about three or four years ago. I began looking into Ubuntu, and its community was exploding, and still seems to be. I wouldn't be surprised if alot of enterprises are installing this distro now, based on its community. Yet still: why Ubuntu? Why not one of the other similar distros? Is it the name? The slogan? The color scheme? Mark Shuttleworth? What's the deal?
Harold
microsofts support is far from free- even the 90 day support is limited. Expect to shell out $90/incident -minimum- depending on what os, etc.
And while we *do* pay for support and it has come in handy on occasion, I have found that google is a far more valuable tool than their support services. First off, it doesn't take 2 days to get a response when you are using google. Second, you aren't forced to do a sysreport by some 1st tier keyboard jockey in Bangalore before they will even consider thinking about the problem you are reporting.
Now, having said that, when you manage to escalate your problem to someone high enough up, you do get quality support. you just have to jump through hoops to get there, which really does IMO make the value of the paid support rather questionable.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Why buy the milk and eggs bundled, when you can easily feed the chickens yourself, thus making the bundle price, overpriced, when compared to the cost of milking the cows yourself.
As a professional programmer and hobbiest computer builder, I've found that support is almost always done better by the community except for true core bugs/issues that don't have a work around. When there is no work around, the vendor is becomes the sole source of support in most cases.
frankly this is because business has cottoned onto the fact it's cheaper to just hire an expert than pay consulting fee's to redhat/novell. to get 24/7 support plus programming and systems training your looking at $50k from redhat for a medium sized business. that hardly measures up to inhouse support which will be faster at solving your issues.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
...and if I might add this to the abstract above, they also don't need Microsoft support.
But the fact that these companies have chosen to use FOSS and GNU/Linux has given them that edge. They are not subject to lock in and some proprietary code of questionable quality. So they can go it alone.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Don't forget though that the ability of bigger enterprise-driven companies like Redhat and Novell to pay full-time linux programmers has had a tremendously postive effect on community distros.
It is hard to imagine what the linux desktop would look like today without the contribution of Redhat and Novell programmers during the last 5 years.
The fact that time is money is the reason more businesses are going to community-supported distros and moving away from things like Red Hat. For many problems, you can find the solution in less time than it would take to open a support incident, then get to work on implementing the solution. Even if you use vendor support and they tell you the solution, you're still the one that has to do it. As someone else mentioned, vendor support mostly comes in handy when there isn't a work-around and the vendor is your only option. That's true for Microsoft support as well.
Although it won't be news to most of us - how many here have actually ever tried getting vendor support on a software application? I've had to call support for obscure hardware and software, but never for an operating system.
And once business see that Linux runs reliably and problems can be solved efficiently by the people they already pay anyway, the choice to migrate ever-larger systems to Linux becomes not only easy, but natural.
So how do Red Hat and Novell pay full-time Linux programmers in the future when no one needs paid support any more because community support is better going forward?
I work at a Fortune 500 non-tech company, with responsibility for, among others, the UNIX side of the house which has been Solaris until now. After months of discussions, we finally got the go-ahead yesterday from our CIO to move forward with Linux support; the intention is to have Linux be our #1 choice for UNIX[ish] deployments, with Solaris only being used when we absolutely, positively, can't use Linux or Windows.
For us, we're going with RedHat primarily for two reasons:
1. We're very conservative -- the whole "supportable platform" thing scares the crap out of some of my coworkers, especially on the applications side, so we absolutely require commercial, neck-on-the-line support;
2. We intend to primarily use Linux as the underlying infrastructure for commercial applications, so one obvious question we had to ask was: What Linux distro is most likely to be supported by our vendors (DB2, Oracle, various Symantec products, etc)? It came down to SLES and RHEL, and ... well, I don't like SLES :)
It's worth noting that while I've got really smart Solaris system engineers working for me, the standard I use is: Can my engineer support this system at 2AM, with one hand tied behind their back, blindfolded, having been woken up from a drunken, drugged stupor? We're not quite there yet with Linux, so it's helpful to have robust support. I've had experience with RHEL support in a previous company and was duly impressed.
I suspect that, 2-4 years from now when we've developed the skill level to support Linux very well without having to rely on Support much (and the good news is, in this environment it's likely most of my well-performing engineers will still be here in 2-4 years), we'll reconsider the commercial support necessity and revisit this. But application compatibility will still be key, so unless mainstream enterprise vendors (see names above) start supporting dists such as Ubuntu, chances are we'll still stick with one of the big commercial distributions.
Why? It's easy to install. It's easy to administer. It's Open, available and Free. It's secure by default (no open ports). It has repositories for thousands of useful and free apps that you can get from their repositories instead of downloading them from random Internet sites. It supports nearly all the hardware you've ever heard of. Server is free. Client is free. Thin client with servers is free. Clustering is free. Did I mention that client licenses are free? You can boot it from nearly any readable media. Boot time is swift even in ways you wouldn't expect it to be (pen?). It's easy to upgrade and paths are easy too -- and free. With Open Office it reads all the common Office formats, for free. It's extensible, adoptable, and free. The BSA will not be beating your door down over this one because they want you to use it.
The better question is: "Why not Ubuntu?"
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Mod Parent up!!
At last someone asked the obvious question.
Novell and RedHat have all but moved out of the paid boxed set linux distro, hoping to make money on the high-priced "Enterprise" versions (with paid support, which mostly means downloadable upgrades).
But when Opensuse and Fedora provide every bit as robust and reliable software and the high priced packages, (to say nothing of Ubuntu), who but the most risk-adverse bean counter will buy them?
With declining sales, who pays developers?
The paid boxed set had better make a strong comeback, and quickly.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Next thing you know they will be letting the gays adopt Linux!
This outcome will be inevitable as Linux adoption grows and users become more comfortable with it.
Further proof that making money off of FOSS by offering "service" is not a viable long-term strategy in most cases.
Giving away free disc in the mail could be a big contributing factor. I'm mostly a openSUSE user (not a real ubuntu fan) but I still have free disc sent to me when new versions come out.
Small to mid-sized shops who get by with less than a dozen SAs and who don't have WAN volume replication concerns might go this route, but there is too much risk for Fortune 500. It mostly boils-down to 3rd party applications, hardware and drivers. If you're a F500, you probably have proprietary storage of some sort and you probably rely on volume replication across the WAN. You want to hook into that storage from Linux, you need a "certified" platform and that ain't going to be an arbitrary set of Ubuntu packages. Sure it will probably work from Ubuntu, until you get kernel panics under load. Then your in-house Linux "experts" call support for the storage vendor and they ask what distro version and driver you're using. When you say "Gutsy Gibbon recent" they laugh and refuse to support you. At that point, your idea of community support doesn't look quite so hot considering nobody in the community can repro your hardware/driver issue.
The boxed set is obsolete, as more and more customers prefer to just download the latest ISOs and go. Physical media is almost obsolete... just point a kickstart at a package tree and install your OS remotely.
Red Hat's sales aren't declining, as their public figures show pretty well. Also, remember that RHEL != fedora, package-set wise. RHEL ships older versions of a lot of libraries, and doesn't (well, very rarely) re-base libraries within each release, allowing ISVs to have a "known configuration" that won't change out from under them. No corporate ISV will certify their product against fedora, or Ubuntu, et al. And companies care about running software that's "certified to run on distro X".
There's still a place for RHEL and even for paid support. Forums decline in usefulness the more corporate the setup gets. Ask a question about setting up openldap, or configuring an HBA, and the replies often become less useful.
I have many RH systems with support contracts around our datacenter running voip gateways, SS7, databases etc. Why? because all that 3rd party applications are certified to run only on RedHat with support contracts. That's the main reason companies get support contract which also includes official updates and patches.
Since the cost of 3rd party apps. runs into tens of thousands, cost of RH support is negligible. Besides, you can't beat the warm and fuzzy feeling you get supporting the cause ;)
My shop has several hundred Red Hat boxes. What do we do with the money we pay Red Hat? Primarily it is to have access to their web site and get the ISOs for different Red Hat versions, as well as individual packages if needed. Or we use up2date/yum on the machine itself to grab packages.
One thing I can say in favor of Red Hat. I used to use Debian at home (now I use Gnewsense, a knockoff of Ubuntu, which is a knockoff of Debian). For many months, the "search the contents of a package" feature was disabled on Debian's website. So if I wanted the program "sftp" but didn't know it was in package openssh-client, I could search there and discover that. But Debian just decided to take it down for a few months. Red Hat would not do that for so long, if at all, and if they did I could call and complain.
One problem with Red Hat versus Sun is if a kernel panics or whatever with Solaris, I can send the core dump to Sun and that's it - the control the OS, they control the architecture (except for Host Bus Adapters and the like), and that not only makes core dumps easier (netdump seems to be preferred on Red Hat, which I think blows), but makes them easier to diagnose - it is all coming from one source. With Red Hat you don't know if is Red Hat that did something, or your hardware vendor (Dell/HP/etc.) Which means they can point fingers at one another, with Sun can not do as it is all coming from one source. OS and hardware all from one source has its advantages. Also, the usual answer from Red Hat and the hardware vendors is we should have everything patched to the latest version, which we never do, so reporting it is pointless. Even if we had everything patched, since unlike Solaris it won't be dumping core to a local disk, we would have to go through the effort of a project where all machines could netdump somewhere. As we only have a few systems go out a year, and do not have the resources to keep all machines up to the latest patch levels, system crashes are often a mystery, which irks me, but due to our limited resources and the shortcomings of the Red Hat model, is just how it is.
The altruistic comments mentioned are silly I think. My boss is not going to shell out money to Red Hat because it goes to "the greater good". If I could get my company to send money somewhere, it would be to the Free Software Foundation.
One thought that occurred to me is companies like Red Hat might be transitional in some ways. Companies wanting to move to something open want hand holding at first. I can think of many examples like this in my career. I worked at a company where we hired Java developers and started using a professional Java application server, which we became unhappy with and then began using Tomcat. The developers said their confidence with being able to develop for the professional server is what let them try Tomcat, which worked out very well for us. The move from Solaris to Red Hat to free as in beer Linux is another example. I see another example with MySQL recently - looking to save money, a division is going to use MySQL for a new project as opposed to Oracle, which they traditionally use. After a few years, might the DBAs drop professional MySQL and go with a non-supported MySQL? Who knows?
I think the companies like Red Hat and MySQL, if they are adaptive and fine tune their business strategies, can survive this transitional stuff. The more traditional companies, the Microsofts and Oracles and Suns are who should be worried.
Support is not where the money is for free software IMHO. And actually, although I'm not in the loop for these companies I don't think either of them make most of their money from "commercial" style support.
The big money is either in custom distribution builds or in custom software development (or both). Usually you sell a "support contract" with it too, but it's more of an extended warranty than a real support contract.
I once had an interesting talk with a salesman from Novell (who is a big free software fan). He told me that he doesn't try to sell support contracts for Linux. Instead he's more interested in providing upgrade paths for existing Netware customers. These products run on Linux and to compete against Microsoft's offerings they need a full package deal (office suite, email, etc, etc). In fact, from his description of what they were doing, I got the impression that the support side was still being run as a "loss center" rather than a "profit center".
To make a long story shorter, successful free software companies will make money providing specific solutions to customers. Those that rely on "generic" (IMHO, useless) end user support will die an ugly death. However, I don't believe that any of Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, IBM, Sun, etc, etc are trying to base their business on end user support.
So we can expect to see more of the same.
I ran and supported my own Linux box for Matlab for a while. It took a fraction of my time to keep things running.
I also ran one for a lab that paid for migration, OS and Java Desktop support, because I was supposed to be a researcher, not an admin. It took about the same fraction of time to keep things running. A quarter of that fraction was waiting for answers. A quarter was spent getting non-answers from clueless drones reading problem-solution flow charts and having to find a cluefull support person. A quarter was trying to understand support people who knew what they meant but weren't good at communicating it. And a quarter was divided between figuring out what the poor communicators meant (luckily I already spoke *nix) and fixing things myself anyway. I spent the same amount of time not doing science both ways, and the latter lab was out a relatively small support payment. On the other hand since I was sometimes just following instructions rather than problem solving, I understood the system less. I'd rather they just let me do it, and since I couldn't pass along as much knowledge to my successor, they probably ended up wishing I'd done it myself also.
Luckily it was only Linux. Now Matlab, you can pay a bundle for support, and another bundle for a rotating plate full of grad students, or you can pay through the nose and still need a hybrid engineer/coder to make your flops flip. In the first case, I supported the Linux and the lab supported a doctoral student by paying him to code Matlab. In the second, we had ample grad students, each with ample knowledge, but so much turn around that things went only half as fast as at the first lab.
I should also mention that just before I got there the first lab was running Matlab on Irix and was hemoraging support money. Those huge SGI boxes ended up as great end tables.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That's why I think some company should offer a per-issue support for Debian/Ubuntu. Not cheap, but good. Not just per phone, but by e-mail too. Maybe a webbased-ticked-system with e-mail updates ?
New things are always on the horizon
If linux is used by someone like me that likes to make my own decisions and research problems paid support isnt critical in most cases. I do like the possibility to get support if i should get stuck but that has only happened with commercial code so far. Linux transparency makes it possible to solve almost any problem by myself.
But, most shops i know is consultant based. When you need a solution, toss out a hook towards some consultants and when someone bites you buy their solution. Support is a must since you dont know much about the systems you have. Theese people are the ones that need readymade nice packages with turnkey solutions. You dont sell them Linux, you sell them specific solutions to specific problems.
If you want to make money the people who rather pay than think are the ones to sell support to.
HTTP/1.1 400
The paid support is for businesses who can't waste their time scouring the Internet and posting in forums for solutions.
Or it is for businesses that do not have the budget for admins smart enough to scour the net. Some companies are penny-wise and pound-foolish - the budget for employees is completely different from the budget for hardware and software. At the places that are understaffed (because the HR department won't pay even market-rates, much less premium rates for premium talent) it can be much easier to slip a 3-5 year 5x8 or even 7x24 support contract in on the same PO has a system purchase than it is to hire good talent.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
For me, and I think a lot of others, it's because it was effectively debian for the desktop. Stable and up-to-date. On the desktop most people want the latest shiny packages and the six-month release cycle of ubuntu gave them a stable debian distro with that.
The difference between an old-skool Solaris, or even Windows, is that if you have a bug, if you've got enough money you can persuade the company to get the guy who wrote the code to stop what (s)he was doing, and fix it, right now. Or in other words, most of the code is written by someone who works for Sun/HP/Microsoft/whatever.
A Linux distribution, as we all know, is software pieced together from all over the place. Fair enough, RedHat do employ a lot of programmers, but most of what comes on that RHEL DVD is written elsewhere. So if you go to RedHat and say "there is a bug in X", they can't often help- they have to go to a third party project and try and persuade them to deal with it. Or they can get a generic programmer, try and get them to look at the code and work out what is wrong. That really doesn't help you above and beyond what you could do yourself.
What I am trying to say is the "Linux" support (where Linux is a distribution) is not really a thing that is possible in the traditional sense.
"if you've got enough money you can persuade the company to get the guy who wrote the code to stop what (s)he was doing, and fix it, right now .. What I am trying to say is the "Linux" support (where Linux is a distribution) is not really a thing that is possible in the traditional sense"
Speaking from personal experience, I have contacted a lead programmer directly and got back a reply within a day. I've even had a response from Linus Torvalds, didn't cost me a penny. Can't say I've ever had the same response in WindowsLand.
davecb5620@gmail.com
At work we would only be happy to pay for commercial support and updates, but we choose to use Fedora instead of RedHat Enterprise simply because Fedora is a better product for what we do, and Redhat does not offer commercial support for it. The enterprise version is geared toward network administration and services, but for a development shop, having access to the add-on Fedora repositories like livna, more up to date software versions, and the greater user base makes Fedora a far better platform.
Seems like RedHat missed the boat on desktop Linux, and Ubuntu ate its lunch in that market. I wonder if they will ever try to make a comeback, or if they will be happy in the network niche.
Ubuntu forums are helpful. Users get the support they need just like any other distro's support forums. I am experienced enough that I have used Arch, Gentoo and Slack in the past and just prefer Kubuntu and its community. That shouldn't make me have the label of kiddie. I thought using Linux was about choice and the freedom to make that choice. A little respect would be okay for other choices than your own.
But if you pay the one time fee for windows, you still have to go on the internet and contact third parties for support (i doubt you will be able to speak to any actual developers)...
You have to pay again (a lot more) if you want support, and you can buy the same kind of support for most other systems too.
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Difficult to do. Most of the kinds of problem where you'd actually want paid support are 'I've come across a bug in package X and it's stopping my company from doing what we need to do.' The support company would need to have expertise to have someone investigate and fix the bug for every package. Probably the best way of doing it would be to act as a liaison and pay the upstream developers to fix the bug, work with them to identify it, and give the customer a single contact point.
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The first can be done in-house or by third parties easily. Microsoft built a huge ecosystem of MCPs and MCSEs to do this for Windows. The same sort of thing is happening for Free Software - either you employ someone in-house who knows stuff, you employ someone (cheaper) who knows a little and can use Google to learn the rest, or you put a consultant on retainer to help you out periodically.
The second is where companies like Red Hat should be - customers come to them and say 'we want to use your products, but they don't do this' and they say 'give us a pile of money and we will add this feature for you.' For companies with small requirements, consultants (including those employed by companies like Red Hat) are likely to be cost-effective. For larger companies, it's better to do this in-house. Yahoo, for example, employs a few people to work more or less full-time on FreeBSD. They contribute their changes back (because that's cheaper than maintaining a fork) and everyone benefits from them. The programmers are happy, because they're being paid. The community is happy because it gets free code. Yahoo is happy because the features they need get priority (as do the features anyone else doing the same thing needs).
There seems to be a fear surrounding Free Software that eventually all of the features anyone needs will be implemented and no one will pay programmers anymore. To me, this makes about as much sense as imagining that no one would employ architects anymore because we've been building houses for thousands of years and there are millions of sets of plans in the public domain that you could use.
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There are more ways to make money on F/OSS than paid support. IBM can more easily sell a mainframe if one of the selling points is that the customer gets the code to the OS. What does IBM care, as long as it moves hardware?
It also helps other hardware vendors, who then no longer have to pay license fees for the OS (phones, mini-laptops, etc.).
And a lot of F/OSS projects could make millions if they would print high-quality documentation, in an actual BOOK, and sell the damn thing.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The only things I have problems with are obscure as I know how to use google and type man. For this forums are pretty useless as you are the only one experiencing the problem. But lukily helpful logfiles and error messages are abound on linux so I usually eventualy sort it. Saying that getting help with a windows problem is nigh on impossible.
I'm surprise that (unless I missed it) nobody mentioned that there's money to be made in training and certification courses, too. Like the RHCE, or whatever that Red Hat Certified Engineer type thingy is... Companies can make dough by offering courses.
-- tonybaldwin.me
Companies also dont want to pay their employees anymore. But, the CEO keeps getting 6 and 7 figure salaries.
Nice world.
how does he feel about asshole?
I'm a recent convert to Ubuntu, but have been in the trenches with Linux since 1994. I've asked several questions on the Ubuntu community forum, questions which were Ubuntu-specific, gave plenty of info, was very polite, and as of yesterday, one question had been there two weeks, and the other, one week, with zip answers.. I'm in the process of weaning my employer off RedHat, in favor of CentOS, on several new servers. :-> I love Ubuntu for desktop systems and especially for laptops, but I'd be leery of it for server use, unless I bought a support subscription from Canonical..
The CentOS forums are what I'd expect of excellent community support.. Several questions were answered almost before I completed posting the question
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I went exactly the opposite direction from you. I started out looking for the easiest Linux distribution I could find and wound up rather board. I like to mess around in the config files and actually having to study/read/work to get my computer to do what I want. I found that most distributions tend to be a "do it all for you" setup. I think that this is one of the great things about Linux and open source software, you can have a distribution that just works and I can have a distribution that challenges me to learn.
Tw1tter sockpuppet. Mod down.
Wouldn't companies that don't have any LINUX gurus in-house be totally screwed even with support? And who other than the Linux savvy IT guy even choose to use Linux? If no one is pushing it, I doubt any company would stray from the norm, and if the in-house Linux guru pushes for Linux, I am guessing being free is the biggest (if not only) thing going for it...
"It's just as good as... and free."
Not that I like ms, but seriously, what does Linux have going for it other than cost? There is nothing I can think of that Linux does *better* in terms of what a company needs or wants. Well, because they want Office. It used to be that Windows would crash, but no so much anymore.
In response to:
Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell.
BUYING support is NOT critical for Linux adoption, and never was.
What is critical, is for it to exist. The day my in-house setup Linux network gets pwned because of a mistake I made and can't figure out, or that I lose my main senior Linux sysadmin, or if I want to start a migration before I can hire in-house people to do it, or even more, if my company is too small to have the people it takes, and so on, I want to have something to fall back to, -if- necessary.
Very few types of software can be adopted into the mainstream without paid support as an -option-, because when shit hits the fan, you don't have time to wait on the forums :)
private parts? My asshole is released under the GNU General Public License. Now toss my salad.
I think we all know that commercial software support is next to worthless; by the time you've spent 4 or so hours exhausting all possibilities on your own, you will call up the vendor and spend DAYS trying to get them to understand the process you went thru, and yes, the system is plugged in, and on and on thru their support script. And in the end you resolve it yourself anyway because nobody you can get on the phone is any more skilled than you are.
I like dealing with Sun equipment because they're generally pretty good at resolving hardware problems, and dealing with hardware problems on Sun stuff is infinitely easier than on IBM/Dell x86 stuff.
However, a related problem is that the S:N ratio online has gone WAY down. I used to be able to search for a relatively obscure error and find some record of someone who had a similar problem and it would help me in troubleshooting. Now when I search for detail on problem X with module Y, all you find on Google is pages and pages of complete newbies asking how to install the OS or something stupid like that.
Grr.
Rght, and suppose you also grow/rear all your own food, change the brake pads in your car and cut your own hair? After all, you can, no less than you can admin your own systems
At our place, we run a *LOT* of sun kit (we have like 2 windows boxes) and when we are changing out the sun hardware, we are replacing it with Intel i386 boxes and Redhat.
Compare the cost of i386 and redhat and support compared to a "proper" sun box, it still works out a LOT cheaper. This is important, especially if you are the one paying for it.
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Wouldn't companies that don't have any LINUX gurus in-house be totally screwed even with support?
Then, uh, why would they switch to Linux?
Difficult to do well, valuable for the customer... something people would pay for... sounds like a great business opportunity for someone that's able to do it. That's the real definition of value added before the marketing droids got their hands on the term.
I started on Slackware, and back in those days, it really made you do your homework to accomplish anything. It took me a long time before I even got X working, or a basic mail config... And I loved it. This was great at that time in my nerd life: I was only supporting my desktop. I'm a geek who enjoys fiddling with things and learning how they work, and doing so, I learned a TON about how Linux and Unix work. I wouldn't be where I am today without that.
These days, I support far too many machines, and I can't give that level of attention to each of them, so I'm really appreciative of Ubuntu's ability to make 98% of what I need work right out of the box, because it lets me spend more of my time fiddling with the parts that actually need to be custom-hacked... And I appreciate that Ubuntu keeps the hacking easy.
I didn't mean to imply that Just Works was the only way to go, though. I love tearing into the guts of complicated technical things, and I'm glad that there are distros out there that cater to this.
Just as mainframes used to be in 70's, a good systems programmer was able to take care of problems and in hard cases just call friends to help - very useful and time saver often..
But - there is an obvious problem as found at that time, fix the system and deviate too much of the main stream - good luck when the next version comes out, your "fixes" will probably not work. Many corporations did go to that trap. I used a lot of long, sleepless night to help them out of "home made fixes and enhancements" which just didn't work in next SW/HW releases.
Yes, it would work IF the corporations would feed the fixes back to the public - do you know (m)any which do? We did but some didn't and later on created nice consulting opportunities which cost the companies a lot! Still needs changes to current corporate / business culture and I'm not holding my breath!
There will be plenty of people who need/want/will pay almost anything (weapons/telcos/banks) for paid support with Linux for a long, long time. The Linux leaders will have to further differentiate and enhance their offerings, possibly adjust pricing and accommodate the free Linux use to an extent, but most of their customers will continue and possibly expand their subscriptions. JL
Also, remember that RHEL != fedora, package-set wise. RHEL ships older versions of a lot of libraries, and doesn't (well, very rarely) re-base libraries within each release, allowing ISVs to have a "known configuration" that won't change out from under them.
However the vast majority of software in RHEL is under the GPL or other free software licenses. As a result there is nothing stopping third parties grabbing the rhel sources, rebuilding them and shipping them. There are several doing it to rhel afiact the best known being centos.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
twitter is his own sockpuppet?
Everyone seems to be missing one big point, "dropping the support" works well if all the software you run is FOSS (e.g LAMP), however if you're running commercial (proprietary) software it's a whole lot different. Most commercial software will support their software on only the "commercial" distros, if you ever run into an issue with their software (and you will), they will not even bother looking into it once they see it's not "a supported OS"; looking into fixing it yourself is out of the question most of the time (no source)...
Outside of that: the point of the 24/7 support has been mentioned, but not really as it should, even with a worldwide crowd of helpful people, sometimes you need someone to take the call at 3am and help you through it right then and there. With the community support you might get the help you need when you need it (or not). I've been there before... In short, if you're in an environment, where being down for 1h is a huge problem (been there), you always want the paid support.