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Ask Slashdot: Paying For Linux Support vs. Rolling Your Own?

Posted by Soulskill on from the how-to-train-your-penguin dept.

schmaustech writes: A lot of businesses pay for Linux support. But at what point does that stop being worth the money? When would a company be better served by setting up their own internal support? When does it make sense for them to write their own patches, which could be submitted back to the community? The inherit risk is that the organization is accountable and accepts the risks if a major bug is encountered within any of the open source applications they are using. What's your perspective on this, and how many major corporations are taking this approach?

4 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Stupid question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Run the numbers for your particular business, dumb dumb, and stop asking for vague, qualitative, subjective responses to validate your biases.

  2. Re:Risk? by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's no liability for patches (except for intentionally malicious ones) to an open source application. If there were, nobody would submit one.

    In this context I think it means "nobody to pass the buck to", if Windows crashes you blame Microsoft, if RHEL crashes you blame Red Hat, if CentOS crashes you take the blame. Then again my impression is that very, very few have the kind of ultra-platinum support where the vendor will jump all over you to solve your problem, it's mostly your problem to solve anyway. It's just a blame shifting exercise, how badly you need it depends on how much shit is going to roll downhill. The technical merits of support is often secondary.

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  3. Re:In my experience by Foofoobar · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The silly thing is... they NEVER hold these companies accountable. When have you ever heard Microsoft pushing a patch for Windows early or an extra update merely because a customer was 'upset'. And Redhat is actually pretty bad about support; they only support a VERY SMALL set of very old releases (vs Ubuntu which keeps their releases pretty up to date). The excuse is 'it might break something' which is a pile of BS since it wouldn't be in the core supported repo. I would laugh if companies actually DID hold companies accountable because then no one would provide support. Its a silly house of cards that I call BULLSHIT on.

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  4. Re:In my experience by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The fact that "Support != Solution" is a painfull lesson for many.