Re: What do SMEs and consultants want from the debian project?
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 01:21:51PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > > Typically, back-porting of items that interest the enterprise.
> > > Similarly, inclusion of items that interest the enterprise. Items could
> > > be: Code, Patches, New Features etc.
>
> Well, there's http://backports-master.debian.org and I'd be interested
> in uploading if it was wanted - is it that there aren't enough
> backports or is something different wanted?
>
> Are there particular archive sections which are more desirable for
> backports than others?
Honestly I doubt backports or rather a lack of them are a problem. Longer term
security updates might help though.
> > How about SLAs?
>
> What services would we be looking to agree levels for? What sort of
> levels?
Well we talking support right? I guess people are looking for all sort of
levels, different reaction time and different availability up to 24x7.
> but I think what canonical has at
> http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/support/server/service-level-agreements
> is within reach of small consultants.
But how do you want to offer 24x7 as a single consultant?
> all on one nice page at the moment. One missing thing mentioned on
> those pages is 24x7 support, but I expect consultants could gather
> together to provide that if it's wanted. Is it? I'm pretty sure the
> co-op would be interested in partnering with support providers in
> other timezones to create a 24x7 service.
Interesting idea, but do you really thing one consultant per timezone is
sufficient? And if you get more, how do you make sure workload and revenue gets
distributed in a fair way?
> But first, what does that body need to do?
Sign contracts and maybe even pay people to do some work. Let me give you two
answered I personally received when talking with represantatives from big
companies in recent years. And no, I'm not going to name the companies.
One statement was: "Give me one company I can sign a contract with, so they do
all the support around Debian we need worldwide and I'll make sure Debian makes
it onto our list of certified Linux distributions." I offered creating a network
to do this but he shot it down. They were not interested in worrying about more
than one supplier.
The other one explicitely asked me to send somebody to their support center to
answer all questions that their customers might have about Debian. This had to
be 24x7, so essantially we were talking about *at least* five people. And just
in case you might wonder, it would have been up to us, not them to pay these
guys.
I really don't how to accomplish this with a group of consultants to be honest.
Michael
--
Michael Meskes
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