[Gllug] just preaching to the converted !

[Ben Fitzgerald]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 06:52:44PM +0100, Simon Morris wrote:
> On 22/10/05, Adrian McMenamin <adrian at mcmen.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
<snip>
> 
> To paraphrase a conversation I had not so long ago
> 
> Bloke: "We'd like to use Linux but the Enterprise versions are
> expensive and with the free versions we don't see who is going to
> support us"
> 
> Me: "But you use Windows and thats expensive, and when was the last
> time you actually called Microsoft and paid for support?"
> 
> Bloke: "Never... *mumble*mumble*"
> 
> Inertia was the problem with that client......

Hi,

I think this is where Redhat have been very clever. They have filled a
perceived vacuum in presenting themselves as a company with a nice
corporate front of a good size. plus they do the whole "slick" thing
quite well.

Leaving aside what you might think of redhat's distributions, they give
non-technical managers a halfway house between the conventional approach
and what they percieve as hardcore, out-there OSS. The leap is not so
great and they feel redhat will catch them when they fall. It doesn't
matter what we may think, it's what the man with the purchasing forms
perceives.

It's just a fact of life that in large organisations the people near
the top will not have been hands on for a good while and linux is only
recently big.

People will always want someone on support with a direct link to the
product who can be blamed when it goes pear shaped. They will see
something like debian as the last ticket in line to an arse kicking
competition ;-)

Yes there is suse from novell, but I don't think that appears on the
radar for many to whom the terms redhat and linux are interchangeable.

When your redhat satellite server can't download the latest packages
from rhn you pick up the phone and start asking questions. When debian
security.debian.org has timeouts who can you phone to hand the issue on
to get the heat off yourself?

This isn't a dig at non-techie managers, nor a redhat eulogy. I'm just
saying that most linux distros curently do not meet these concerns, and
until they do, redhat are sitting pretty.

I'm very positive about the future of linux, but I think both companies
and OSS have to adjust to fit together better.

Damn. that's a long post. Even I'm bored now...

cheers,

ben.

-- 
Registered Linux user number 339435
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug