[ale] Distro Reply

[Benjamin Scherrey]

Jeff,

	I mainly agree with your desire premise but not your conclusion. Sticking to a commercial 
linux vendor does not mean you are dependent on a single source so long as you have all the 
'Source' of your implementation. Back in my bleeding edge days (less so now), I was happily 
downloading the latest kernel and doing custom builds with beta versions of gcc, etc... all on top of 
'commercial' linux platforms. Open Source is the solution to your desire - commercial support is an 
attractive option for most companies (and many individuals). If I were a company with more than 25 
linux installs that had to be maintained, I'd likely build my own internal distribution - either from 
scratch, or on top of an existing one. Its really not that hard to do. As linux becomes more 
mainstream, however, more options become available and this is good for everyone. Being 
mainstream means more general users and more profit potential which is what attracts the 
commercial intrests. I'm very happy to have both the big commercial interests and the 
hippie/commie folk all doing their best to make linux out in their own image - just as long as they 
keep it open. No harm no foul.

	best regards,

		Ben Scherrey

PS: Just an interesting anecdote that is a great example of your fears - I had a BIG client who used 
Cognos in a pretty big way. They were running into problems so we debugged it and determined 
that it was generating some incorrect SQL. We pointed the problem out to the vendor who agreed it 
was a bug but they weren't "big enough of a customer" to warrent a bug fix and if our client would 
only buy more of the product they'd get that taken care for us very soon. Apparently 5 figures isn't 
big enough for them... you can almost imagine our answer. An Open Source vendor can't hold that 
over you.

1/3/2005 9:43:00 PM, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:

>I guess what bothers me about the attitude described here (not saying
>that Jerald holds it) is that I had thought that part of the whole point
>of using Linux and FOSS in general is that you *weren't* dependent on a
>single source or *any* source of conditional support - the idea being
>that you as an IT implementor/integrator had inviolate say over how your
>software behaved.  This "viable, supported alternative" talk sounds like
>nothing so much as wanting the ball and chain back.
>
>I *know* what it's like to be stuck in a certain kind of closed-source
>hell where you can't get your app fixed or your peripheral to behave
>properly for love *or* money, and I also know what it's like for paid
>support reps to turn their nose up at you because the way in which you
>needed to adapt their product to your needs was, in their eyes,
>"unsupported."  There's nothing about the OS in question being Linux
>that keeps implementors out of that wasteland.  
>
>Jeff