Adrian Midgley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Thursday 28 October 2004 13:08, Tim Churches wrote: > > Here in the state of New South Wales (Australia), a Dept of > Commerce > > tender for all-of-govt contracts for Linux software and support > > services (especially the latter) closes today. When the > tender results > > are announced in a month or two, it will make it > considerably easier > > for government departments and instrumentalities, including health > > authorities and public hospitals, to deploy Linux and linux-based > > systems in mission-critical roles (where 24x7 in-depth support > > infrastructures are a sine qua non). > > Yes. A huge gap continues to be having some structure or > fractal organisation > that allows the Open Source/Libre community to generate a > credible support > operation. > > The difference is I think less than it might seem, because as > time has gone by > and I have seen a few things I have come to regard the large > corporations not > as they project themselves - monoliths of stable content and > nature - but as > transient clouds which hire and fire, reform and rebadge, > coalesce and > fragment, assimilate and divide so as to provide whatever it > is that the > customer has convinced themselves is essential.
Yes. We runn Red Hat Enterprise Linux on several of our more important servers - what you pay for is essentially a support contract, rather than a software license (since it is all GPLed except for the Red Hat name and logos embedded throughout it). When we have required tech support, the phone is variously answered by quite know;edgeable people in Brisbane, San Fransico and mostly Manila. However, should we ever need someone on-site, there are similarly trained people a few minutes away in Sydney. In other words, they have a global cloud of support staff, linked via a shared, Web-based support information system. It all works very satisfactorily. Novell has a similar, but even better developed distributed support infrastructure, which is why their entry into the Linux support market is very welcome. And there is also IBM, but I have no direct experience with them. HP also offers combined support for various Linux distros running on its hardware, as do some of the other hardware providers. Increasingly the support is not just for the bare operating system, but for much of the stuff bundled in the distros, such as open source databases, email and Web infrastructure and for desktop deployments, office applications. So for large oragnisations, the necessary support infrastructure to swap mission critical operations to Linux and other FOSS solutions is already there, I feel, or just about there. People just don't realise it. However, such support does cost some money - not outrageously expensive, but not small change. For small-to-medium sized organisations, I think that there may still be a significant gap in cheaper support for Linux and FOSS offered by smaller, more local IT firms. What really needs to happen is for these firms to form consortia to provide after-hours support, in the same way that GPs often form consortia to provide after-hours coverage to each others' practices on a rotating basis. Tim C > So apart from convincing the customers that what they want is > Open Source, > which is a process moving with something like historical > inevitability, we > need a few very sparse skeletons into which we can fit at need. > > But in the absence of those emergent structures, keep coding > and talking and > using FLOSS by preference, and we will get there. > > -- > Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better > GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/ >
