Re: What do SMEs and consultants want from the debian project?
On 18/02/12 04:14, Toni Mueller wrote:
>
> Hi Michelle,
>
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 05:57:58PM +0100, Michelle Konzack wrote:
>> Am 2012-02-17 21:56:29, hacktest Du folgendes herunter:
>>> On Thursday 16 February 2012 11:05 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
>>>> 1. what prevents SMEs from using debian more?
>>> Lack of "Enterprise" Support. So what is enterprise support?
>> I do not agree with this, because I work in Strasbourg (France) and Kehl
>> (Germany) and do exactly this...
>
> I have to disagree with your assessment. Although most of us (me too)
> can, do and will support SMEs in their use of Debian, at least MEs (>=
> 200 employees) will often not consider the small player, but go for a
> bigger player like SerNet.
>
> Those bigger shops rarely support Debian, but rather RedHat or SuSE.
That's generally decided from floor-up rather than top-down. If you
can't get the skill sets then (a good) business won't offer the support.
Here in Canberra Australia there are a number of large contracts that
have a big, fat, uncontested margin between cost and supply (backend,
midrange and desktop) - the difficulty is not pitching or signing, it's
delivery *due* to lack of suitably experienced and skilled staff.
Not that there aren't good Debian people out there - it's just difficult
as an employer to assess them. Generally it's just RedHat or Canonical
trained - and technical skills alone are not what many employers need (x
years as a Debian developer doesn't, on it's own, translate into a
business asset).
>
>
> I found it to be a problem that there is no so called "long term
> support" version for Debian, and only days ago, a customer of mine
> realized that the long term support for Ubuntu is most likely only a
> paid option, not a free one.
It (in practise) is also a long term of updates. I've had a couple of
those that I introduced to Debian - they won't go back.
First introduce them to change control and the economics behind it.
Second point out that Ubuntu is build from Debian.
Third explain Stable, Testing and Unstable.
Lastly show them some real life uptimes.
> One other thing that I found crucial to
> Debian adoption is that commercial packages are usually not certified
> for Debian, but only for commercial distributions.
Yes!
Much of that is pinned on hardware certification - I'm not sure how
Debian would solve that problem... (10 seconds thought) perhaps some
measurement against RedHat device support?
The nature of Debian means that a Debian guarantee is unlikely - but all
I need is the knowledge that *I* can support it *without* having to do
extensive testing before talking to the client/writing the tender.
>
> Don't argue - if the user wants (in my case) WebSphere, AutoCAD or
> Varial, he might be unwilling to bet his >$100k investment on
> experiments with an "unsupported platform", but goes with what the
> vendor specified. There's also more often than not no point in arguing
> that WebSphere might not be that much of a good idea in the first place,
> and I'm pretty confident that the free software world has nothing to
> match the other two packages.
Absolutely. Especially if their staff are WebSphere certified ;-)
It's also a market opportunity (low cost *development* servers and
backup solutions) - while I don't ever advocate running WebSphere or
Oracle on Debian for my clients, long term support is a large part of my
business - especially legacy support (a big weakness with those
expensive software vendors). Support, and a product designed to give my
clients Choices(TM pending) ie because I use Debian there is no lock-in
- you can change support to another company or distro anytime. Debian
does many things differently - but I've never come across features of
Debian that other distros can't replicate. The reverse is not true.
>
>
> Kind regards,
> --Toni++
>
>
Kind regards
--
Iceweasel/Firefox extensions for finding answers to Debian questions:-
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/Scott_Ferguson/debian/
Reply to: