[ILUG-BOM] Re: Pitching Linux to corporates?

[Vivek J. Patankar]

20 mails on this subject and nobody has mentioned one of the main
factors major corporates care most about.
I'm talking about the "Who's responsible for an f-up?" or "Passing the
buck." factor.

A common scenario would be something like this. A server running
Windows 2003 fails due to a problem with the OS. The business owner of
the server screams at the IT Manager, who inturn screams at the techs.
The techs promply point a finger at Microsoft who is ever willing to
bend over, take it up the tailpipe and provide a solution/workaround
ASAP, ie. if the company is a "Gold" customer.
I have seen this happen, and I believe that this is a common occurance
as most major corporates end up being Gold customers of Microsoft.

And this is not just with Microsoft, a recent incident that I came
across proved this.

A certain corporate has a very large mail setup, several servers
hosting thousands of POP mailboxes. The OS used here was RH7.3 or RH9.
A decision is taken to cut down the number of servers that mailboxes
reside on to two. The hardware selected was powerful intel based
hardware from Sun. The OS of choice was Centos 4.0 because it was
recommended by the vendor who supported the mail servers. A hardware
related hiccup caused the corporate to refer the matter to Sun who
promply refused to provide support. The reason cited for the refusal
was that the boxes were certified for RHEL and not Centos, so Sun
wouldn't be responsible for problems.
After being stung by something like this, the business side decided
that the servers are to be migrated to Solaris, and any software
distributed with an open source license, specifically if the
license/documentation states that "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS AND
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY" and that the developer is not resposible for any
data loss or other problems arising from using the software.
To what extent this  decision was adhered to, I don't know.

No matter how much we stress of the benefits of Linux instead of
Windows, the question of accountability for problems with the software
and who is going to fix it will always be a stumbling block. Agreed
that GNU/Linux distributions have much lesser problems than the
competitor, but the corporates want someone to turn to or someone to
blame for the problems they face, and that *someone* should be able to
fix the problem or provide a workaround promptly. Microsoft seems to
be doing that pretty well.

Any comments on this case?

-- 
Regards
Vivek