On Apr 4, 2005 11:50 PM, Dave Hornford <OSD at hornfordassociates.com> wrote: > Collins Richey wrote: > > For you boss it may be a question of scale & risk management. Spending > money on RH means never having to explain why she thought 'some kid in a > basement could support our business' in an outage review. > Yep, most of the responses I've gotten support the conclusion(s): 1. A support contract is good for CYA (and perhaps not more?). If it feels good, do it. Most ingrained business risk analysis types do not understand community support in the first place. Having a contract in place gives them a (not necessarily justified) warm fuzzy. 2. The kid in a basement may be able to provide more responsive support (especially for environments that the vendor chooses not to support!) than the vendor. In actuality, community support is a world-wide, effective team, and certainly not just a kid in the basement. 3. Multi-tier structuring of the OS choice can certainly make sense. There's probably not a good reason to pay for support in a (possibly) bleeding-edge test environment. -- Collins When I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.... The Berlin Wall has fallen. - Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt