On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 07:07:31PM +1000, Jason Lim wrote: > Well, I think you'd be in the minority of you don't care if vendors > officially support Debian. From a commercial perspective, what happens if > your tech support department calls up the vendor asking for some > assistance, and as soon as you tell them you're running Debian, they go > all quiet?
If they can not provide generic support for GNU/Linux, then we either do it ourselves or go looking for another vendor. Personally I have not seen even slightest hint of this problem so far. Most vendors do not have any official support for any Linux. > And think of the bigger picture. How do you expect a university, a largish > business with hundreds of employees, etc. to select Debian over Redhat (or > one of the so-called "compliant" distros)? Remember most purchases have to > run by non-tech people, so it doesn't matter how good Debian is "behind > the scenes"... if they ask the critical question "is it supported by our > vendors", which do you think they'll choose, Debian or Redhat? I would hope my university department is a good example of this. They choose on technical merits only. They have 500+ Linux workstations and mostly Linux based servers that are used by about 3800 people. They chose Redhat for the base of their distribution because at the time Debian did not have enough support for non-interactive upgrades. I do not think they care about some official vendor support and the non-tech people trust their tech people. I would hate to work for a company where non-tech people did not think I could professionally make technical decisions. The same applies to vendors too. Personally I would much prefer for Debian to continue putting effort on the technical aspects instead of public relations. I do not see any reason why Debian should be the so called winner as long as it works for me. Though this topic seems to be off topic for this list. -- Juha-Matti Tapio, Product Manager, gsm. +358-50-5419230 Kirahvi Domains Ltd, Tekniikantie 14, Espoo, Finland
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