abigail [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
*>
*>Perhaps. And that's the problem. Buying a canned solution is often much
*>cheaper than rolling your own.
And, even buying a canned solution vs. using an OS canned solution is
often much cheaper or more attractive when it comes down to it.
A business unit where I work wanted an 'internal gossip site' ala /. for
their developers. They wanted to use slashcode and since I, one Unix
person in a largely MS using corp population with 12 MS admins, was happy
to offer them a choice to use it even when the MS guys were pushing a
'total document solution'.
However, it took me 2 days to set it up and about 3 hours of getting the
application itself to install on Solaris due to some problems with the
Makefile. The group has no people familiar with Perl or Unix and thus I
was put into the position I said at the outset that I didn't want to be
in, namely the catch-all support person. Of course, I was told after it
was running that this was an important 'VPs will see this' kind of site
even though they said it was a casual 'internal gossip site' previously
which made me wish they had given the problem a bit more thought and
possibly had gone with a solution that they were familiar enough with to
support themselves or something they could buy support for since I don't
do Web support unless at gunpoint.
When you have someone calling you every 15 minutes asking 'is it up yet'
and 'mr. VP of hoopdy hoo is waiting' opensource makes you twitch a little
since with a commercial product you could call someone and say 'i'm having
a problem installing product X on the Y supported platform, what am I
doing wrong' and, theoretically, get an answer.
I can't blame corporations for embracing products that have service and
support behind them after going through that.
e.
