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Paid Support Not Critical For Linux Adoption
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Aug 08, 2008 10:59 PM
from the why-buy-the-milk-when-you-can-get-the-cow-for-free dept.
from the why-buy-the-milk-when-you-can-get-the-cow-for-free dept.
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.'"
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Support is Better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Support is Better (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of that experience is due to the "for the experienced user" selecting criteria? Commercial support costs a lot, because there are a lot of calls, which requires lots of people, which means you have more level 1 and less level 3 people(proportionately anyways), which makes those people overworked, which lowers the qualify of their work(again if only proportinately). But the costs don't go down(indeed, they tend to go up). So the perceived value of support goes down.
Parent
Re:Support is Better (Score:4, Informative)
Working in paid support I don't want to mention any names. But you've got a point. I'm pretty good but can't know it all. And sometimes get thrown onto supporting stuff I have little to no training in. The sad thing is a lot of people calling in know even less. So they're sometimes paying for me to search google, forums, internal knowledge bases, on their behalf.
But as someone else pointed out, people pay for the 24x7 and to leverage the organization's knowledge. If I don't know, I can run over to someone who presumably will. Also good to be able to tell the boss someone owns the problem. But I can also see it's kind of hard for support organizations to hire ppl who know what they're doing into phone support. It has a stigma about it. Not sure how long I want to stick around doing it either for that reason.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now before you start in on the "Microsoft support is crap", "no support for OEM" and "Canonical does offer paid support", I just want to say that for most users that know a little (less than power user,
Re:Support is Better (Score:5, Interesting)
Can I add a bit to that? ok, sure I will.
Businesses like to have 24/7 support so they can point fingers at someone else. Anyone who has supported Solaris for the last 10 years knows that supporting Linux is a walk in the park. Having forums and "The Google" is a bonus.
In my current day-time job, they are adopting F/OSS based on cost. After the initial 2-4 year honeymoon the PHBs have finally realized that the knowledge base in-house is as good as what they can pay for, and community support is often faster than a phone call, things have worked out smoothly. We pay for minimum support to ensure timely patches, that's it. Some systems that are not 100% mission critical fall to Fedora or CentOS and in-house admins to manage it.
We have 40-75% of hardware hitting end-of-life and the choice to move to commodity hardware with Linux OS is becoming very easy, almost expected. Its a point where is seems a no-brainer, just whack in a blade server with a LAMP stack and configure.. what's the hold up? what do you mean it will be 3 weeks? Seriously. Now that they see the competence of F/OSS on commodity hardware it is the go-to configuration because of in-house knowledge and skill and the fact that owning the skills makes it a true zero cost option compared to others.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Support is Better (Score:5, Insightful)
Company execs also prefer knowing that someone other than themselves is ultimately responsible if something does not work.
!!!
CC.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's called the ubuntu forums. Seriously.
Not trolling. Really.
Re:Support is Better (Score:4, Interesting)
One example from my experience as a new less than 3 years Linux user is that I started on debian and their IRC was fantastic, folks in there would walk me through "read the man page"! but they have no forum that I know of (maybe a mailing list). Ubuntu IRC is clogged up most of the time, but you can get questions answered there too, its just that the help isn't always as fast/good. I now pretend to be using debian and ask them for help and they are very helpful 'till they discover that I use Ubuntu and then they go all dark and silent on me!!!!
Having said that, in Ubuntuforums there are fantastic walkthroughs, howtos and other folks with the same problem who found a solution all over the place and I highly recommend it. Its not just full of kiddies.
Parent
We started with Red Hat (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Amanda [amanda.org] is very good for backups across various *nix systems. I'm running it on Solaris, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, and Ubuntu machines at various locations. There's a bit of administrative overhead in the initial setup, but it's bullet proof once you have it running. Combine it with a large disk array and some software VTL and you have a backup system that requires basically zero overhead.
Re: (Score:2)
I found the same thing with Bacula. My only minor complaint was its command line interface for restorations and administration. Apart from that it was bullet proof and really well laid out.
Re: (Score:2)
Cross platform (i.e. Linux/Mac/Windows) we are currently using Unison (lower setup/install on client and server) but probably will go to Backula next. Looked at Amanda, it seemed to have pretty steep setup curve (at least at the time I was looking at it).
How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I wouldn't be surprised if alot of enterprises are installing this distro now, based on its community. Yet still: why Ubuntu? [...] The color scheme?
Baby poop brown is so non-fun that it must be a serious business application.
Re: (Score:2)
Ubuntu's colors are "Starbucks"* Orange & Brown. Or a close-up of an elephant's side.
*I don't know if Starbucks invented the color scheme, but they sure did use it to death. And every "trendy" mass-market "bistro" repeats the refrain ad nauseum.
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:5, Funny)
Baby poop brown is so non-fun that it must be a serious business application.
Baby poop also comes in green and yellow.
Oh shit I hope Intrepid Ibex isn't green and yellow.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I had heard nothing but good thing
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You hit an interesting nail, there. I wonder how much of Ubuntu's community came around looking for something a bit more up-to-date than Woody, which was getting long in the tooth when Ubuntu first came around (and didn't get a new release for more than a year after that).
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:5, Interesting)
It all really points to the choice that open source provides and the principles of sharing the effort. Once any open source product gains a bit of a lead and of course adheres to the principles upon which it is founded, it gains additional users, which provides greater numbers for support, development and distribution, which gains additional users, which naturally enough creates greater numbers for support, development and distribution , etc. What tends to disrupt that cycle is a change in principles of the founders of that particular open source product and this happens because a variant can so readily be created which does adhere to the preferred principles of the majority of actual end users.
So redhat went a bit corporate, SuSe via Novell went a bit M$ ie. nucking futs, mandrake was struggling with finances, Sun was struggling to get a handle on it, IBM like a millipede is pretty smartly keeping a foot in every door possible and most of the others were not really seeking a broad Linux market, so Ubuntu, right principles at the right time and a very good job they done of it indeed.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It is as stable as Debian but much more polished.
(To the point that I switched to Debian when I realized my learning was hampered by Ubuntu's ease-of-use)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Please tell that to the Sun Enterprise 450 I've got at work.
And we're talking about a SPARC-based server, it's not really that obscure.
Now the irony is the fact that ~2 years ago I got a old HP (PA-RISC-based) server and the only Linux which installed without glitches was Ubuntu (5.10). After the reboot the X started and we had a graphic login (horribly slow, the machine is a dinossaur, but still).
I like Debian, it's my preferred Linux for anything
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:5, Interesting)
because after installing some other linux distros and having a horrible time getting anything to work right, i gave ubuntu a shot, and everything just worked right away.
why ubuntu?
because it works.
i want my time on the computer to be wasted reading slashdot, not wasted by pointless driver/hardware issues.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
RedHat is too corporate and server oriented.
Debian is a big bunch of bureaucratic nerds.
All the other distros are too small.
When Ubuntu came along it offered the technical prowess of Debian, without the bureaucracy, a big financial backer, and a focus on the desktop instead of the server. That's why it took off.
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:4, Interesting)
I just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with SLED10 ($50) and I wiped it for Ubuntu. Why? I use Gnome. I didn't like the "XP/Vista like" application menu. I didn't like the package manager... I tried using it for a few days, but went back to Ubuntu figuring that I just spent $50 to give Linux one more OEM sale instead of Windows. Sure, I had to tweak the Thinkpad buttons a bit, but after that everything just worked.
Parent
Yet still: why Ubuntu? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 rea
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a Debian user for a very long time at home, and on my personal servers, and I supported Red Hat Enterprise at work, which was a necessary compromise. I experimented with other distros many times, but always kept coming back to Debian, because in the long run, it ran smoothest. Setting it up as a desktop (or laptop!) required a lot of work, but when done, it was bulletproof.
One day I tried Ubuntu in my usual spirit of checking out what the competition was up to... And I was blown away. Everything Just Worked even on my balky laptop. And yet, under the hood, it is just a refined Debian system, and when I need to change something (rare, due to the attention to detail in the base install) it could be done easily without breaking things, or fighting against a configuration system... Fully easy and refined, yet fully hackable.
There's no going back, the same as I would never go back to Red Hat from Debian, or to Slackware from Red Hat.
Other important factors are:
So in my view, it's no one thing - they've just managed to do well in many areas, without screwing up any major aspect.
Parent
I work at a 900+ seat Red Hat shop (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I work at a 900+ seat Red Hat shop (Score:4, Informative)
(AC for obvious reasons)
That's funny, because I work at Red Hat, in Raleigh, and sit right next to the L1 bullpen for RHEL support. I know Raleigh is in the South, but it's not Bangalore. So at least some of the time, you're talking to an actual American. Most of them are pretty cool and know their shit, and there isn't a script in sight. And, oddly, not a one of them is south asian. So YMMV by timezone. Welcome to the global economy...
-Shadowman!
Parent
from the Maximum-Verbosity dept. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you keep chicken in your garage?
Pro Support Is Only Needed For Showstopper Issues (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pro Support Is Only Needed For Showstopper Issu (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ?
People supporting Redhat supports community distro (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:People supporting Redhat supports community dis (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re:People supporting Redhat supports community dis (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Wow, How Timely (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Not "Buying" It (Score:4, Insightful)
Why pay? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
"Linux" support really not possible (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
real Linux support .. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 res
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you've got enough money you can usually persuade the author of a piece of Free Software to fix it too (I'd certainly be very happy for people to pay me for bug fixes and new features). Often the amount you need to pay them is low, or even nothing (although an offer of payment is likely to increase the priority of your fix).
The difference is that for traditional UNIX, you don't have to talk to the programmer. You have one phone number and the person on the other end is responsible for finding whoever
Commercial offering worse, not better (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:cheaper to employ (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's been true for at least 5 years. It used to be easy to find intelligent people online who ran into the same problem. Now all you find is rank amateurs posting stupid questions that happen to contain some words that are relevant to your search.