On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 07:54 -0700, Joshua Daniel Franklin wrote: > Of course, we are left with workarounds until the fix passes QA. > > Again this indicates to me that: > 1) Red Hat has some great people that know their stuff and will > take the time to figure out an issue reported on bugzilla.
Agreed, I hope I never implied otherwise. I've also had excellent support via Bugzilla on some bugs (several CUPS issues) but others have languished. > 2) Keeping bug reports in the community currently gets better > results than going directly to support. In fact, until support > improves maybe the money is best thought of as a donation. :( I always open a Bugzilla (or search for an existing bugzilla) and then open a support case. I reference the Bugzilla in the support case. As far as thinking of my support as a donation, the reality is that I've been a commercial Redhat user since at least 1997. When I started at my current employer back in 1999 I introduced them to Linux and they were open to it. We downloaded and used Redhat and Yellow Dog Linux (at the time, pretty much a Redhat clone for Mac/PPC) and I worked with the community to fix several bugs and fixed some on my own. They worked great, and when the time came to introduce more complex applications it was fairly easy to sell them on Linux. We purchase our first Redhat "Enterprise" products (Redhat 6.2EE) preloaded on 4 Dell PowerApp servers back in 2000. We could have easily supported ourselves, but we understood that it took effort to create such a product and we wanted to support the Linux cause so we paid for 6.2EE. In 2001 we implemented our ERP system on SuSE Enterprise Linux (full paid support) and in 2003 we switched all of our Linux platforms to Redhat Enterprise Linux and have continued with that platform since. During the last 8 years we have always paid for support on all of our systems largely to support the Linux cause. We want Linux, and by extension Redhat, to succeed. We have constantly pushed our hardware and software vendors to include Linux support. We've done everything we know to do to support Linux and Redhat, including paying for support on machines that we could easily support ourselves. At this point, Redhat should be past the donations stage. If they want to play in the enterprise space they need to have an enterprise focus, and constantly introducing major regressions is not a good way to impress an enterprise. Until the last year we had been considering moving even more of our infrastructure to Linux, but the number of business impacting regressions this year has been astounding and has significantly harmed the perception of Linux to the management types, including myself. Later, Tom _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
