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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?

9 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. In my experience by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I work with clients ranging from small business to Fortune 10 companies. On the SMB side most do support their own, though they rarely write patches. I don't know a single large enterprise using Linux that doesn't pay RedHat or whoever for support though. There are many reasons for that. SLAs are easier to hold a third party to than an internal organization. It makes the C level people feel better to have a company they are paying accountable for support. They do not have to carry the burden of the extra staff needed (that's a big one). The list goes on.

    1. Re:In my experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I work for a company with probably 150k employees. I'm guessing total staff approaches half a milllion if you count the onsite contractors.

      I would be horrified if they brought the linux support in-house. That's not our job. We have a very specific job, and working on linux is not it. *Using* linux is definitely it, but but developing it would be a huge distraction.

      I've been using Slackware at home since 1996. The company I work for has thousands of Suse boxes, but the company I work for makes luxury goods, not linux distributions.

    2. Re:In my experience by elbles · · Score: 5, Interesting

      We were having a problem with a "no IRQ handler for vector" issue that was crippling networking on a lot of HP DL360G7 systems we had. We were running CentOS on some of these systems, and RHEL on others, and though we never reached out to Red Hat ourselves.

      Red Hat had a bug open for it (bug 887006 if I recall correctly), and it was interesting to see what their response was to paying customers. They did provide special kernel packages to help fix/troubleshoot the issue, but it still went on for a long time. To make matters even worse, even when the bug was visible to me (as a Red Hat customer), lots of it was redacted, to the point where it was difficult to determine key pieces of information. And while I don't have access to my RHN login right now, I don't believe that bug is accessible to anyone outside of Red Hat at this point (which is another problem itself)

      I suppose my point is even in circumstances where you can hold the vendor responsible and where they are taking action, it doesn't guarantee that the problem will be fixed when The Business(TM) wants it to be. And for problems like this, where it's affecting or going to affect a large number of people, it'll get the proper attention it needs, paid support or not.

      I get paying for support from a CYA perspective, but that's really all it is, IMHO.

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

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

  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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    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. Linux support by Lando · · Score: 3, Informative

    To maintain and support an entire OS takes a lot of work. We aren't talking about just development here, but checking to make sure things run properly and making the changes needed to ensure stuff is supporter. The point I would start looking at rolling your own distribution and supporting it is the day you decide to start selling your distribution.

    For internal use, sure you might have to have a team to do internal work to modify certain sections in order to make the OS work for you, but they are relatively minor compared to ensuring an entire distribution works as needed. Let another company do the heavy lifting and just have your company modify it and submit changes back through the system as desired. Feedback works as well.

    To run an entire distribution and all the subsystems takes billions, look at IBM donating to Linux as a whole they give value back to the community rather than trying to extend and embrace for their own purposes. Redhat does the same and they do distribution and sales. Other companies are the same. I guess you can make the decision on your own but personally I suppose the time to switch is when you have support fees in excess of what it would cost to maintain an entire distribution. I'd assume someone around a thousand people focused on the project would be about right. A thousand people's salaries would buy a lot of support. A better idea might be to hire developers for the subsections of the OS that you need and have them work with the community.

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    /* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
  4. Re:Linux Support is Rarely Worth The Money by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Funny

    Pinging others in the shop?

    I would think that a TCP/IP conversation would be more productive.

    ACK....

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    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  5. Ask yourself: What is our business model? by msobkow · · Score: 3, Informative

    You're asking the wrong question. The question is "what is our business?".

    If it's not your business, you hire experts to take care of it.

    My guess is "producing a Linux distribution" isn't in your business model.

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    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  6. Re:Risk? by Shados · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Except there's support included when you get a Microsoft product. If you're beyond that and don't have a support contract, its $250 to pass the buck over to them if their shit goes kaboom on you.

    Once, I was at a company where we ended up with a critical bug in SharePoint ( ::shudder::...that was a long time ago...) auditing.

    After going through the support monkey, we eventually had something silly like 12 microsoft engineers and PMs on the line in a conference call debugging the issue with us a few times over a week. In the end they gave us a fixed up DLL, and things were good.

    Net bill: ~$250 (give or take).