> I don't know about others, but I would tend to consider the > distribution and vendor's support together; if I want a support > contract for SuSE Linux, SuSE would have the inside running.
Very true, but it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation - you would only start serious evaluation of a distribution for which you could get a financially acceptable support deal. This is where suppliers could price themselves out of the evaluation phase if they're not careful. > I'd be unlikely to order SuSE Linux and Red Hat support. Certainly not at the moment, since both are really unproven under fire. With a bit of maturity in th eenvironment, I'm sure that the various suppliers will establish differing reputations for support. Maybe one will emerge as a front runner. > If their support didn't stack up, I'd look to third-party support. It > could be that Red Hat would be invited to support SuSE Linux. Time will tell. I think the modern environment is much less forgiving than the old one. People used to defend decisions - I've seen organisations that I _know_ have had horrendous problems with specific vendors still recommending their product because the decision making executive didn't want to admit he'd made a mistake. I don't see that happening in the new environment - people seem happier to say: "Hey, we screwed up - xzy sucks and we've moved on". > It wouldn't be so different from Amdahl providing MVS support in the > mainframes it supplied. A slightly different situation. because Amdahl technically only had to support the SCP/BCP component. Towards the end, this was a vanishingly tiny bit of a running OS/390 system. In the early days, of course, they had to do the lot. I have a copy of the original letter from IBM's lawyers saying "IBM does not assert any rights with regard to its Systems Control Programming". -- Phil Payne The Devil's IT Dictionary - last updated 2002/01/20: http://www.isham-research.com/dd.html UK +44 7785 302803 Germany +49 173 6242039
