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

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?

Comments

Re:Risk?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:In my experience

[houstonbofh]

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