On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 1:27 AM, Andrew Shafer <and...@reductivelabs.com> wrote: > The way I saw it before your email (and this isn't just in regard to Puppet) > was a classification of support customers handful of overlapping > categories. For example 'bought support as a company policy', 'recognized > the value of the project and bought support to support the project' and > 'really needed help with the software'.
Very recently, I looked at Zmanda as a backup solution. Zmanda is a commercial entity that sells the Amanda open source backup system. They're offering a web-based front-end for Amanda, as well as packaging and most importantly, support. For something that is "critical infrastructure", its not hard to justify paying for support... if you have enough infrastructure that you're going to need support frequently. (How frequent is frequently enough depends on what you'll tolerate in terms of outages.) I don't use Amanda, but if I did, I would be using the work someone else did and all I could give in return is my contribution to the community. If I used Zmanda, then the relationship is very different. They have a clearly defined support channel that their customers go through and their may be a little friction there. I don't want to hear that I have to file a bug report - I'd rather open a trouble ticket, upload my log files, and let a level 1 technician write the bug report and give me the solution. What it comes down to is my employer can't / won't pay to "support a project" or fit a policy. We will pay for support to put an upper bound on the amount of time our staff has to spend working with something. In the end, Zmanda had a promising product, but there were too many bugs and their package was just too immature. It was a lot cheaper than the alternatives we were looking at, maybe when our current contract is up we'll look at them again. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
