Enterprise Linux's exaggerated value #2: the support you're forced to buy
Yesterday I began what will probably end up becoming a series of posts about how y'all need to rethink the meaning of the word "enterprise," and related, the value of support. In specific, I called out how "Enterprise Linux," (usually meaning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse/SLES/SLED)
is overvalued because the packages you pay for often need to be replaced with packages you don't pay for.
Another problem with Enterprise Linux is the way it's sold. You buy the bits and support
together. People might think it's hard for an open source software vendor to just sell the bits, when technically, so much of it is "free," and its easier to just imagine all those software dollars are actually paying for "support" (representing commercial man-hours, not free) but the simple fact is many organizations would love to pay for the bits they could technically get for free, and just do without the facade of expensive support, when the support they get from other resources is more responsive.
Photohosting site smugmug was in that boat, and
blogged about their issues with Novell and Redhat.
...we loved Red Hat Linux, we loved how good they were at building & testing their software, we loved their mechanism for delivering software updates. We just didn’t need support.
We got on our knees, begging and pleading with Red Hat to let us pay for a “software updates only” license. They wouldn’t have it. “Support comes bundled with updates”, I was told, “no ifs, ands, or buts”. I *want* to pay Red Hat for the valuable service they do for us and the community. I just don’t want to pay for the part we don’t need - human support.
I would really like to pay Red Hat for all their hard work building and testing the software. .. It’d be the right thing to do. But Red Hat won’t let me.
The company ended up going with CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I'll write about another time. Again, you'll notice the author isn't trying to avoid paying for the software, he just doesn't want to pay for a service ("support") he doesn't need.
WHAT WE CAN DO
Many of us who use Linux in commercial situations are more than happy to pay for it. Let's feel comfortable paying for it in different ways. We need to get over the traditional model of a single, central body of developers and supporters being embodied by a single company. There are different currencies and parties involved. Give back to your providers creatively with money, bug fixes, documentation, and sharing your best practicies. Take the time to identify the upstream developers and projects and consider funding them directly. Publicly share your challenges and success stories on the internet, the attention will help future users and the developers by making their project less of an unknown quantity for future users.
But most importantly, be willing to break free of this totally broken tradition of thinking paying a bunch of money to a central body in some way solves your technical problems and protects you. It may make certain people in your organization
feel safe, but take the time to run some numbers. What value have you really gotten out of support in the past? Put the burden of determining value on those who sell it.
Labels: business, cent os, centos, enterprise, linux, novell, open source, red hatredhat, sled, sles, supports, suse
