Re: [Hampshire] Greetings!

Paul Tansom wrote:

---8<--- Snip --------
>
> Don't get me started. I don't really consider Red Hat as a Linux vendor
> anymore - or at least not for any customer that isn't looking for an
> enterprise level support agreement to go with it anyway. If you're not
> running on certified hardware then the Red Hat subscription only gets
> you access to the package repositories, support have no interest and
> actually suggest using Google or switching to Fedora.
>

Perhaps another perspective is required here?

First up, I am speaking from the personal point of view of a little cog
in a big machine, and this does not represent the big machine's
viewpoint in any way.

Big organisations such as ours have been slow to come over to Linux
because there can be a lot riding on the efficiency of their systems.
For instance, a financial institution regulated by US law could have its
license revoked if there were enough high severity failures to impact
trading and payments with other organisations (which may include
governments and the people looking after you pension, etc.).

Stand that on its head for a moment and put yourself in the position of
a Linux vendor trying to flog support services to these very serious
people with big legal departments and big budgets behind them. Would you
be prepared to offer an open-ended contract in terms of configuration
and hardware to customers like that? I personally can see why you might
want to impose certain constraints on them before you start offering
guarantees to them, just in case they get some crazy idea about running
these payments systems on clusters formed out of the last batch desktop
machines saved from the skip or some ancient Sun kit kept alive with
spares from eBay.

I know that is a fairly outrageous example, and I am really play devil's
advocate since I am not a fan of big corporates, but I can see why you
(Linux Vendor Inc.) might want to establish certain rules before you say
that you will support such institutions 24x7 with a tight SLA.

> I'll bite my tongue and stop there I think. My recent(ish) dealings with
> Red Hat support and Red Hat installations were less than pleasant
> unfortunately. At one point if you mentioned Linux Red Hat was *the*
> name. These days I, personally, generally forget the exist.
>
> Sorry Jon, no doubt you see a completely different side of things, I'm a
> disillusioned ex-Red Hat user who became more disillusioned when he took
> half a step towards being an ex-ex-Red Hat user! That said I wish I had
> a day job that involved more Linux work than mine currently does :)
>

Mine involves increasing interaction with Red Hat and as a result I
think it is fair to say that the 'purity' of any Linux distro will be
tainted by its dealings with big business. If you (a Linux distro) want
to move up a league (from the geeks and enthusiasts to 'the real world')
then I believe you have to accept big boys' rules and the inevitable
knocks and compromises that accompany them. Sure, the rewards are going
to be bigger but then so are the potential pitfalls - it's the nature of
business, and you ignore that at your peril.

Now I'm certainly not putting that forward as a good thing or advocating
any position as correct or incorrect really - I'm just thinking aloud
around the topic in the naive way that I do and in the vain hope that I
will eventually say something that makes a bit of sense!

Sean