Tim Churches wrote:
We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our public health surveillance
servers, and the support costs are certainly not cheap (but are slowly
falling year by year as the competition heats up). And we've had very
little reason to call support, but when needed, it is very good. Phone
is answered day or night in Manila or Mumbai by someone who speaks
excellent English, is polite and pleasant, they can call up registered
details of your servers and your call and problem history instantly, and
are extremely knowledgeable. We had an obscure bug with the Apache web
server running out of shared memory semaphores (we were abusing it), and
the support person (in Manila) amazed our data centre person who called
the support line by a) actively replicating the problem b) finding a
work-around c) writing a patch which fixed the problem d) filing an
official bug report (with the suggested patch attached) on the Apache
web site. All possible because a) they knew their stuff because b) they
had access to the source code of the entire system. And local people are
available to make house calls if really necessary.
I defy anyone to find that quality and responsiveness of support for
Microsoft software, at any cost.
I always thought Microsoft support was like the Yeti. I was therefore
stunned when a mate of mine put in a call to the MS help desk and, like
you, spoke with three knowledgeable techies from somewhere in South East
Asia over the course of a 90 minute conversation. They were able to
successfully resolve his business critical problem. The cost was covered
by his support contract and you usually don't need to make too many of
those calls. Admittedly, there weren't able to patch the source code in
this situation.
I was also somewhat surprised to glimpse in the newsgent's PC User for
this month that it lists RHEL and Novell servers as potential
alternatives to Vista in the small to medium sized business market. I
wondered if Vista's licensing costs, licensing management costs,
software lockdown and DRM may be having a small effect on the price
sensitive business market.
David
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