Paid Support Not Critical For Linux Adoption 199
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.'"
Support is Better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:first post (Score:0, Insightful)
We can't. We suck cock, go ask the asshole-eaters.
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.
Re:easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Support is Better (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How did Ubuntu get it's community? (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:cheaper to employ (Score:4, Insightful)
Paid Support Not Critical For Linux Adoption (Score:2, Insightful)
...and if I might add this to the abstract above, they also don't need Microsoft support.
But the fact that these companies have chosen to use FOSS and GNU/Linux has given them that edge. They are not subject to lock in and some proprietary code of questionable quality. So they can go it alone.
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:easy (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact that time is money is the reason more businesses are going to community-supported distros and moving away from things like Red Hat. For many problems, you can find the solution in less time than it would take to open a support incident, then get to work on implementing the solution. Even if you use vendor support and they tell you the solution, you're still the one that has to do it. As someone else mentioned, vendor support mostly comes in handy when there isn't a work-around and the vendor is your only option. That's true for Microsoft support as well.
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?
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.
Re:People supporting Redhat supports community dis (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.
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.
Not "Buying" It (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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:Support is Better (Score:2, Insightful)
they have no forum that I know of
Debian Forums [debian.net]
The Debian forums are full of people who have no qualms about saying "Go troll somewhere else!" Even given that negative, I still prefer the Debian forums to the Ubuntu ones because I can't handle the kind of user who posts an error message which contains instructions on what to do, then asks what to do.
Re:We started with Red Hat (Score:2, Insightful)
Your RHEL support money goes into funding development (eg kernel dev) as well.
Its going to lead to the odd situation where the companies that are actually _contributing_ to improving Linux won't be able to provide competitive support.
Re:I find the forums pretty useless (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.