gagging - Re: freelance sysadmining - other thread went bonkers
On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Vikki Roemer wrote:
> > ..sure, but Vikki also plans to sell customized boxes.
> > On these, I would sell Sarge.
> > And charge extra for anything else.
...
> If the customer *insisted* on (*gag*) RH or Mandrake or something, I would
> definitely charge extra.
be prepared to be be gagging lot more than you think ..
and be sure that the "extra charge" is more than enough to make
you take the deal vs moving onto ohter prospects
charging "extra" is good ... even better if one can collect on it
"80% - 90%" of the extra charge will be for some flavor of windoze
if people are buying 20-30 systems at a time with Win2K installs
at $200each (and upwards) ... than we just *gag* and build it for um ..
- dual boot- windoze + linux + some minor tweeks
otherwise, we usually tell them we dont support windoze under
their budget for "support" they are expecting, and tom-dick-n-harry
pc shop down the street will install windoze for FREE, so why pay us??
- we tell them we do linux customizations in hw and sw and mw ....
- everybody wants custom this and custom that ( which is different than
the default distro ) and expects it to be done for free.. :-)
- and nobody wants to pay for patches ... oh well ...
( do you do it for free or bill um )
- and its always on different hardware ..
- as long as a budget and check is in hand ... they've probably
got a deal, and if the budget they have is in a different
ball park, tom-dick-n-harry down the street works out good
( or dell, compaq, gateway, etc, )
c ya
alvin
- just our mix of "who comes knocking"
- and unless we reply within 1-2 hrs .. the deal is gone by the
time we reply after that ( consistently replying for each email
from them ) -- not easy to do
- about 95% of them w/ checks in hand are looking for rh support
and customizations, 5% was for slackware, 1% (usually geeky admins) was
looking for debian, and suse is getting up the tree in the last
few months
- keep in mind their managers are the suits and guess what
distro those with budgetary ccntrol wants ..
- if you're concentrating on debian ... for a living ... you'd need a
good long savings and/or a good debian-based customer base
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