Re: [ossig] Government sector standardize on SuSE Linux?

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 19:47 +0800, BIGrat wrote:
> > See, I said from the beginning, "policy" for even favouring OSS was a
> > bad idea. Competition, a complete TCO study, and a needs-meets-wants
> > kind of procurement is best
> 
> ... and you expect a govt dept to do all that?? ;-)

No I expect whomever is giving them advice to do all that

> > > My recent proposal of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux being rejected not
> > > due to price. The customer told me Mimos, OSCC and DRB-Hicom are
> > > standardize on SuSE Linux. Thus they want to adhere to that standard. I
> > > can't verify it... Also in another argument that they prefer SuSE is
> > > because it has corporate (Novel) or local present; thus making it a more
> > > preferred choice.
> 
> the issue here is that all decision makers (junior to senior) want to
> cover their a**.  in the past it was "you cant go wrong with ibm".  
> at the end of the day these same decison makers want a neck to wring,
> preferably the principle, not a local distributor.  secondly they tend
> to view local presence as a committment. A more well-staffed company
> gives the perception that response is faster; especially with the
> SLAs' mantra going round the govt depts ;-)

Hmm, fair enough. AFAIK, if they still go with IBM, they should equally
be pushing RHEL and SLES

Now, I do realise that Novell has a presense in Malaysia, and largely
they have good support for the middleware that they sell. But for the
down-trodden OS level style of people, last I heard they were still
dishing out technical support stuff to a now-defunct company

How true is all of this? I have no idea...

> > What, Red Hat Malaysia's office and one-man show isn't good enough for
> > them?
> 
> afraid so.... (or was your statement made in jest??) ;-)

But there's an office. And the commitment to a support center and the
ability to get engineer's help from the rest of the world is highly
likely

>  > This is seriously troubling, and I hope you keep us updated as to what's
> > going on
> 
> well, the sky isnt falling,.. not yet anyhow.... but the issue here is
> not so much as rhat vs suse for the pie; rather who's got the better
> support structure from the user's point of view.  it may not be
> necessarily correct, but that's his/her perspective.

Can we get an insight into said perspectives?

> > (and troubling from a perspective that folk might want to sell Ubuntu
> > Linux with support around it; or even FreeBSD with support around it)
> 
> the SMI segment  is still waiting... ;-)

Maybe nows a good time to kickstart MOSIG (again)
-- 
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, 
then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi


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