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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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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.
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.
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?
That's easy, it's polished Debian. Debian Stable is absolutely wonderful for server environments. Security support tends to last years, most everything "just works", packages are thoroughly tested, and apt cures dependency hell, but packages aren't always very recent. Ubuntu essentially was taking Debian's unstable branch, stabilizing it, and releasing it every six months to act as a desktop OS. It's kind of a best of both worlds situation, up to date and stable packages.
I maintain that the single largest advantage that a Linux desktop has over a Windows desktop is package management. With synaptic (and apt) you can easily and quickly search for and install software. This is the killer app. Ubuntu does, imho, more right than any other desktop linux has before, although I still think there's a bit more work to do to be ready for prime time.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
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.