[ProgSoc] The joys of commercial support

[jedd <jedd@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

 Greetings,

 Has anyone here had any experience with commercial linux
 support, preferably domestically?

 Better yet - has anyone had any commercial linux support
 for non-RedHat, specifically Debian, systems?  I've heard
 tell such things exist -- but they're not run by PHB-style
 Americans, so perhaps they lack the requisite credibility.

 Does the support extend beyond phone/email - and into the
 realm of writing patches, liasing with upstream authors, etc?
 Is it limited to the distribution fabric only?  F.e. - a bug with
 libc isn't going to be fixed by RH, presumably, but instead
 fobbed off to the owners of libc.  Perhaps libc's a bad
 example, but you get my question.

 What arguments do *you* provide to get around people
 making fundamentally technical decisions that affect you,
 that are based upon a complete lack of technical expertise.

 <aside>
 I'm [once again] in the middle of a pointless bunfight -- with
 me on one side pushing Debian, and contractors and vendors
 on the other side pushing RedHat.  The usual FUD pops up
 every few minutes, with comments regarding commercial support
 (or lack thereof).  I can understand it coming from people who
 think commercial support exists (from people like Sun, Oracle,
 etc) .. but from it's worriesome that it also comes from people
 who were in the same meetings I've been in over the past
 few months as Oracle 7.1.6 / OAS / Solaris 7 / JDK/ Telstra 
 issues remained steadfastly unsolvable, despite paid-up
 commercial support, for several months.
 </aside>

 Jedd.

-- 
 jedd == jedd at progsoc dot org
 "The unemployment queue is no longer just for philosophy
 majors - useful people are now being affected too."
			  -- Kent Brockman, The Simpsons.
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