On Mon, 22 Jun 2009, Sorin Srbu wrote:
"Commercial support is currently unavailable, although this is being investigated by the community. The difficulty is that CentOS is a volunteer run effort."
Don't overreact Spiro. I really like your blurb, but the difficulty sentence has a negative ring. Please rephrase that single line and you get a gold-star. ;-)
I see Day's point, this is really a "soft value", the touchy feely stuff, nothing technical, and it's not about lying either, it just sounds negative, that's all.
that is *exactly* the point i was trying to make -- words have emotional content, so avoid the ones with the *wrong* emotional content. and, yes, when it comes to promoting a product, sometimes it *does* come down to touchy feely stuff.
rday
p.s. let me make it clear why i'm being so obnoxious at the moment about this. a local company currently supports their software suite on linux on suse only. they're getting more call for RH support. i'd like to suggest they consider centos because i might get some support business out of it. as part of their consideration, they will undoubtedly go to centos.org and poke around, and i want them to be happy with what they read there, and not be scared off. and maybe, out of the goodness of their hearts, they'll donate to centos because they like it so *everybody* wins.
does that clear things up a bit? :-)
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======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.
Web page: http://crashcourse.ca Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rpjday Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday ========================================================================
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On
Behalf
Of Robert P. J. Day Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 12:05 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] link to "commercial support" page isn't really
helpful
p.s. let me make it clear why i'm being so obnoxious at the moment about this. a local company currently supports their software suite on linux on suse only. they're getting more call for RH support. i'd like to suggest they consider centos because i might get some support business out of it. as part of their consideration, they will undoubtedly go to centos.org and poke around, and i want them to be happy with what they read there, and not be scared off. and maybe, out of the goodness of their hearts, they'll donate to centos because they like it so *everybody* wins.
FWIW, my understanding with community-driven projects like CentOS is that commercial support is tricky. Only a few distros (to make an example) manage to pull that one of, and those that do are "huge" companies compared to a volunteer organization like CentOS. Karanbir has earlier mentioned that money is currently no issue, but rather the lack of manpower. As such, commercial support will be even *very* tricky to implement. The best thing to do right now IMHO, is to write that something "will happen in a near future" about the ongoing effort developing this and actually invite 3rd party companies to deal with the commercial support. They probably can and will have the incentive to actually build a proper support-org. Let's be frank, support on a voluntary basis is not going to get much farther than the wiki, the mailing list(s) and forums we have today in a 1-2 year prediction. The devs et al would most probably want to have a life outside the pet-OS. 8-) With that said, any commercial company needing a linux OS with paid support and that likes CentOS, should go for RHEL as a first choice; CentOS is after all a clone of RHEL.
On another track, CentOS is a very mature enterprise OS and puts other similar distros to shame IMO. Overall, this is as good as it gets. Like it or not.
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Robert P. J. Day -
Sorin Srbu