On Thursday 28 October 2004 13:08, Tim Churches wrote: > Here in the state of New South Wales (Australia), a Dept of Commerce tender > for all-of-govt contracts for Linux software and support services > (especially the latter) closes today. When the tender results are announced > in a month or two, it will make it considerably easier for government > departments and instrumentalities, including health authorities and public > hospitals, to deploy Linux and linux-based systems in mission-critical > roles (where 24x7 in-depth support infrastructures are a sine qua non).
Yes. A huge gap continues to be having some structure or fractal organisation that allows the Open Source/Libre community to generate a credible support operation. The difference is I think less than it might seem, because as time has gone by and I have seen a few things I have come to regard the large corporations not as they project themselves - monoliths of stable content and nature - but as transient clouds which hire and fire, reform and rebadge, coalesce and fragment, assimilate and divide so as to provide whatever it is that the customer has convinced themselves is essential. So apart from convincing the customers that what they want is Open Source, which is a process moving with something like historical inevitability, we need a few very sparse skeletons into which we can fit at need. But in the absence of those emergent structures, keep coding and talking and using FLOSS by preference, and we will get there. -- Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/
