On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 04:03:17PM -0000, Ken Yuinipo wrote:
> Why bother supporting E-Smith then, Darrel. Private-label your own version
> of ES. It's Linux you know... Everytime you advertise E-Smith to your
> customers, you are on the losing end. E-Smith gets the glory and you end up
> doing all the work.
Sure, anyone who uses e-smith is welcome to exercise their rights under
the GPL. However, all that will get them is some software, which they'd
then have to maintain. Given that we have about ten people working full
time on maintaining and improving e-smith, that'd be hard enough just on
its own.
And that's before you even consider the service and support we provide.
If you listen to some people you might get the impression that we don't
provide anything, but in fact that's far from true. We provide an awful
lot both to our paying customers and to the open source community who
use our software for free.
Our professional support is available to any Partner who registers
servers, or to the occasional end-user who registers direct with us
(although we strongly recommend that they go through a partner) via
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and our 800 number. We have people staffing that
phone line all day every (business) day, and they do an excellent job
by all accounts -- for instance, Linux Journal recently published a
review of e-smith with a glowing testimonial on our support, and so
did Network Computing.
We provide a bug tracking database via [EMAIL PROTECTED] and make every
attempt to include fixes to major issues in the next release. We track
security issues for the many, many packages included in e-smith and
ensure that we make updates available in a timely manner. (Note, though,
that most updates don't apply to us, as we pre-configure the various
software packages in the most secure way possible.)
We operate a number of community fora and mailing lists for e-smith
users to help each other out, even if they haven't registered a server,
and we even give some of our developers' time (in between all the
development work we do) to answer questions whenever possible.
We also maintain a manual of about 120 pages in length (at last count)
and provide it for free on our website, along with a collection of
additional documentation written in-house, and a central point for
user-supplied documentation which we are happy to host or to link to at
the author's request. We also provide FTP space for contributed RPMs
and indexing and search facilities, to make it easier for people to find
contrib modules.
So as you can see, it's not "just Linux".
But now I'd like to address the assertion that "e-smith gets the glory
and you end up doing all the work". Let's put that another way:
"e-smith offers a well-known name to help you sell servers, and you can
charge your hourly rate for any customisation that you do."
We encourage our partners to customise and extend the e-smith server for
their clients, and in fact we've put a lot of work into making e-smith
extraordinarily extensible and customisable for just that reason.
The idea is that partners should be able to rely on us to develop the
underlying server, and they can build on that base to meet their
customers' needs. Our partners provide installation, customisation and
first level support to their customers, and the reason we like that is
not because we're lazy, but because we want our partners to be able to
maintain a close relationship with their customers and derive the
financial benefit from that.
And what do we ask for in return? We ask that in order for a Partner to
be able to seek help from [EMAIL PROTECTED], they should register the
server (which costs them a pittance relative to whatever amount they billed
their customer for the hardware, installation, customisation, and their
own ongoing support). Compare this to Microsoft NT, where a price
ticket in the thousands will get you no support worth mentioning and a
bug list measured in the TENS of thousands.
If you've been using e-smith for a while, and seen what we've done from
version 3.0 to 3.1 to 4.0 to 4.1 and beyond, you'll know that we're not
just sitting back doing nothing, and that every version has included
significant improvements including those suggested by our paying
customers (highest priority) and open source users, and bug fixes and
security patches taken from those reported to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
[EMAIL PROTECTED] respectively.
I hope that clears up any misconceptions you might have had about the
work we do, but of course we'll leave it up to each individual to make
his or her own decision about whether we provide something worthwhile.
The complaints you might have recently heard on devinfo are "sound and
fury, signifying nothing", and you should compare them with the positive
responses we've had, a small sample of which are at
http://www.e-smith.com/feedback2/
K.
--
Kirrily "Skud" Robert -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Developer website: http://www.e-smith.org
Corporate website: http://www.e-smith.com
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