On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 11:30:14AM -0800, Jordan Brown (Sun) wrote: > Darren Reed wrote: > >>System administrators are *not* the market. System administrators are > >>an unpleasant burden that the real customers, the business people, > >>must pay for because they don't have any choice. > > > >I disagree with this. > > I suppose. How many sysadmins are the people who actually sign the > purchase req? What value do sysadmins contribute to the actual process > of making money? They're overhead, and if they can be eliminated the > business wins.
At my previous job I insisted that we *must* have a Solaris 8 source code license. We already had SunOS 4.1.x and Solaris 2.4 and Solaris 2.6 source code licenses. These had proven critical a couple of times in helping us debug various problems (e.g., once, a brilliant colleague of mine rebuilt the old SunOS 4.x trace command to print bigger buffers so we could observe what an application was trying to log at a time when syslogging was broken because of an mbuf shortage being caused by the self-same application). Besides being inmensely helpful on admittedly are occacions, source code was also continually helpful as a learning tool. As a result of this my erstwhile employer spent quite a bit of money to buy a Solaris 8 source code license. I dare say that it was money well spent. Of course, now there's OpenSolaris. But the point remains that I, then a sysadmin, successfully lobbied management to spend money on something that they didn't obviously need. There are other examples of sysadmins I know influencing purchasing decisions. Here we're talking about sysadmin tools. Such tools need to not be overly constraining. Nico --
