On Wednesday, February 6, 2002, at 10:11 AM, Roberto Mello wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 04:22:23PM -0500, Peter M. Jansson wrote:
>> One of the biggest issues in a "serious" production environment is that
>> Sun will sell you a reasonably-priced service contract where you can call
>> them as much as you like for issues, with no time limits on each issue,
>> and no limit on the number of issues. You can't buy such contracts for
>> Linux. Linuxcare is a popular Linux service vendor, and their plans
>> basically boil down to $200/hour support unless you lean on them, and
>> then
>> the price will drop some, but you still face issue/time-per-issue limits.
> What about Red Hat, IBM, HP, Compaq, Penguin Computing? I thought they
> sold
> support for Linux systems in all kinds of flavors.
You can buy Linux support, but not on an all-you-can-eat basis, like you
can from Sun for Solaris system, or from SGI. Again, the support for
Linux systems all tends to boil down to a per-hour support contract, with
no assumption of risk on the part of the provider, and the support is
software-only. I didn't believe my client when he told me this, but I
went and looked, and the basis for support for Linux is different from
that for the proprietary operating systems. An SGI or Sun/Solaris support
contract gets you unlimited time on an incident. No Linux contract does
that.
