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BSD Operating Systems News

FreeBSD Commercial Support From BSDI 35

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Don't-need-the-sunshine dept.
As this release explains, BSDI are about to start providing support contracts for FreeBSD. Support options will include options from per-incident to 24x7 support. Linux already has a number of high profile companies providing support contracts, such as Red Hat, and IBM. It'll be interesting to see how much of an issue the availability of BSD support turns out to be.
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FreeBSD Commercial Support From BSDI More

FreeBSD Commercial Support From BSDI

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  • Is this the first commercial support offered for FreeBSD? If so it's another bullet point to mention to the PHB when mentioning FreeBSD. I've worked at too many places where 'who do we pay for support' was a make/break decision when obtaining software.
    Are there any commerical support contracts available for the other *BSD variants?
  • Strangely enough, I think FreeBSD has always been a more ripe opportunity for companies to provide support for, since such companies won't have to deal with the forking of user space administration code found in Linux distributions. How does Linuxcare do it? (Or do they not do it correctly?) I've learned and used Red Hat for a couple of years, and I have a lot of difficulty fixing the system's of friends running SuSE. Does LinuxCare have a department for every major distribution? Of course, it seems most BSD users have used UNIX/Linux for several years, and probably won't need the support options. Does anybody know how big of a deal this is to corporate IT managers?
  • More support for any "alternative" OS is a Real Good Thing, especially with the possibility of an impending breakup of Micro$oft. It can only be hoped that a breakup will cause more individuals and companies to seriously consider alternatives. The more stable the Open Source Community as a whole appears, the greater the chance of more people/companies turning to Open Source for their needs. Good support is a big factor in the outward appearance. Outward appearance will draw people in. Quality support will keep them.

  • Hah (Score:1)

    by atomly ( 18477 )
    I'd imagine those support lines will be about as busy as the Dixie Cup tech support line.
  • you know, the first time i read this post, i went back and forth with myself.. I even thought that on a certain level, it was a pretty damned amusing little piece of flamebait. But at this point (where i've seen it in 3 different threads, multiple times) i'm just plain annoyed. Goddamn boy, you had a good thing going, and you just had to over do it, didn't you?

    With every re-posting of it, my belief that it was a half-way decent bit of parody gets dimmer. I'm starting to lean toward the idea that maybe all of those spelling mistakes WEREN'T intentional.

    (Yes, responding to it will only cause it to continue or even escalate.. but damn, i had to say something at SOME point.)


    -The Reverend
  • Yeah, every "software engineering" company I've worked at has had the same issue with free software (although interestingly GCC was considered well supported enough to run with).

    This is a huge deal in the future of open-source software. It sort-of completes the business model:

    Write software

    Give it away free

    Charge an arm and a leg to corporations who want support

    This could be how open-source software goes mainstream, and (more importantly) how the practioners can start seeing real money. The money issue affects all sorts of things, but most notably licensing costs and the weird personnel-intensive testing stuff that people do to make decent UIs.

  • Free, FreeBSD/Linux/Unix support (Score:3)

    by Blue Lang ( 13117 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @10:24AM (#1108879) Homepage
    As an aside, if you log into yahoo chat between 6pm and 2am EST on most nights and head into the "Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris" room, you can usually find some pretty kick-ass help. I go there and answer questions just as a way to keep sharp, and because I sometimes miss doing support.

    They have a java chat client for the yoonix kiddies.

    (No, I don't work for yahoo or make any money off of this, I do it cuz I like doing it.)

    --
    blue

  • Why would I need this? (Score:3)

    by howardjp ( 5458 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @10:25AM (#1108880) Homepage
    Typically, I managed to break it myself, why would I should I ask for help fixing it? :)

  • Well, as many (yes, not all) BSDers have been moaning about for some time, Linux is getting all the hype and BSDs have unfairly been left out in the cold. This oughta change that.

    So the merger between BSDI and Walnut Creek (or whatever that was a few months back) has now resulted in a BSD getting commercial-grade support. perhaps now other companies will jump on this new bandwagon (hopefully for the right reasons, too) and we'll see BSD take its rightful place out there in the IT world.

    This is a good thing for all of us who value a vital marketplace, where one has a choice about what to run. I don't see any negatives here for anybody.

  • disclaimer {
    I use Linux primarily, and happen to like it better than BSD. However, I also use FreeBSD on several boxen, and enjoy it.
    }

    It seems that those folks who are pro-Linux and anti-BSD might be getting more competition from FreeBSD with this advent.

    As mentioned, Linux already has quite a bit of corporate support - but from a corporate perspective, this might be even better. BSDI supporting FreeBSD will, IMO, be very attractive to companies interested in a free *NIX.

    I just hope that the competition isn't so fierce that Linux gets shoved backwards on the acceptance ladder. I can't wait until I can walk in the door at a random company and see Linux on the desktop, BSD in the server room, and Windows in the boss' offices (we wouldn't want the PHB's to have a powerful OS, now, would we? :P)

    Just my USD0,02

    --

  • interesting.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ever notice that when ever there is a pure BSD thread, no matter what anyone says it's marked at a rating of "1" or "2", and never anything else? i don't believe any of the moderator people actualy read what we write....
  • In a large corporate environment, time is money. Example: for every hour the problem persists, it costs the company $10,000. If $200 worth of tech support can get the problem fixed one hour quicker than without tech support, it was a very good $200 investment. As a sysadmin, I will use tech support even when I think I could figure it out myself because of this. Outside of work on my own system? My personal time is usually spent learning anyway, so I can well afford to take the time to fix it myself using whatever resources are available on the internet. But tech support is a lifesaver when something mission-critical goes down. (Not that I have much problem with my *NIX systems....99% of problems where I work are directly M$ problems)

  • Perhaps it would be better to send the PHBs into 'the field' with WinCE and let the sysadmins run the company for a while. :)

  • Re:Another checklist item completed (Score:3)

    by gavinhall ( 33 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @11:04AM (#1108886)
    Posted by BSD-Pat:

    Walnut Creek has supported FreeBSD commercially for a long time, you could have bought a service contratc or even per-incident service from them.

    FreeBSD support is not new, however BSDi has a good reputation in the business world for support on BSD/OS.

    This is a good opportunity for some more exposure.

    -Pat
  • It seems that those folks who are pro-Linux and anti-BSD might be getting more competition from FreeBSD with this advent.

    Well, if those "pro-Linux-anti-BSD" folks (hereby defined as Linux zealots) are getting more competition, then that is just too bad. If they don't like it, then it is their problem. Like all zealots, they can (and should) be ignored.

    Competition is good, and it is only in the best interests of Open Source that FreeBSD, too, gets commercial support. One should not forget that, in the grander scheme of things, Linux and FreeBSD and in the same boat.

    I'm a Linux user, btw, with little experience in using *BSD.

  • You didn't know that your comments are submitted to /. under GPL [gnu.org]. This means they can be redistributed by Katz, et al, and anybody is free to twist your words around to say whatever they want, as long as a copy of your original post is made available to anyone asking for it.
  • Posted by BSD-Pat:

    generally BSD is getting alot of attention lately, however the majority of the slashdot audience is Linux oriented. Be happy we get the exposure we do on Slashdot.

    -Pat

  • yup... the IPO checklist.


    "Follow the money", All The President's Men `deep throat'

  • 1)FreeBSD's NAT service is superior to Linux's IPMASQ/NAT service. 2)1st post are always short because people are racing to get first post instead of taking your time to write something interesting. password cracking on Unix/Linux/BSD, DeCSS, techno MP3 remixes, Jnapster [eyep.net]
  • I am kinda fond of FreeBSD, although, to say the truth, it's a bit more "coarse" than a typical Linux distro. I guess you know what I mean, starting from the shell onwards. However, I happen to be a big Slackware fan, and I really like the BSD inits. Slackware is anyway the best Linux distro around.

    FreeBSD is quite popuar in our labs here at my company, because the TCP/IP stack is considered better written than the Linux one. It's not performance problems, Linux is OK with that, it's some advanced features that don't work quite good on Linux, like OSPF and source routing.

    So, I have been looking around for some commercial backing, like the one Linux enjoyed in recent times. This seems to be the first one, and I hope there will be more. Congrats to the *BSD community.
    (On a side note: I am also a BeOS user, and for some reason the typical BeOS network will have FreeBSD as a server, and same goes for a pro-BeOS site.)

  • Re:Another checklist item completed (Score:4)

    by seebs ( 15766 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @11:32AM (#1108893) Homepage
    Walnut Creek already had a support department in place (Hi, Chris!). The support departments are starting to get merged, so those of us on the BSDI side are learning our way around the FAQs for FreeBSD, and I think the FreeBSD folks are starting to learn BSD/OS.

    For what it's worth, I'm a BSDI support rep, and I think this'll be a great deal. Most of us know a couple kinds of Unix, and 90% of support work is based on troubleshooting skills, not system-specific knowledge. You'd be amazed at how many calls are resolved with "Did this work before? What's changed since then? Is there a typo in that file?".

    Anyway, this isn't "the first", but it's certainly going to get more publicity than the Walnut Creek support did, just because of marketing.

    Other BSD's? I dunno. I believe OpenBSD's guy at Comdex was saying that some company with a name like "netsec" was doing support for OpenBSD. There are lots of consultants doing NetBSD support.

    Obviously, you're all going to want to know whether BSD, Inc., is planning *BSD support in general. Anything I say on that could turn out to be wrong in the future; about all I can say is we don't have a press release announcing it, and we don't have a press release denying it. It is somewhere between "impossible" and "guaranteed". I will say nothing more, and I want you all to know that that doesn't mean we will, and doesn't mean we won't. Stop trying to second-guess me. I'm a professional support rep; if I want to talk for a paragraph without saying anything, I can, and you'll never get a useful shred of information from me I'm not willing to give out.

  • ftp.slackware.com is running Apache/1.3.11 (FreeBSD) PHP/3.0.14 ePerl/2.2.14 Perl/5.005_03 on FreeBSD

    sez netcraft :o)

  • I don't think this will make much difference for the some time. If you were willing to adopt the OS without support, you already have it, and you don't so much care to pick up a support contract. On the other hand, it very well might help with adoption as those who wouldn't select the OS without major support (Walnut Creek notwithstanding) might choose FreeBSD now.

    Used to be, if you were really wound round the axel about support, you'd get BSDI. This doens't come as much of a surprise after the merger.

  • Thats becase WC CDROM/BSDi is mostly full of FreeBSD fans... We run all our servers off of the same file server... If it be FreeBSD, Slackware, OS/2 or windows software. Im the only slackware user in the company, beyond the slack crew. (Mind you, Im not anti-FreeBSD.) So Patrick is a little out numbered with the FTP server, and running Slack Linux on it.
  • Now, if only NetBSD could be added to the support portfolio... :-)

    All my PC's run BSD/OS. The other computers run NetBSD (or PalmOS).

  • Could you use Chuck instead of a newspaper on *BSD news? Can't remember the last time I saw him. Thanks.
  • Even proprietary software has always had a service-oriented business model. Typically you're selling the future upgrades to the user as much as the current "completed" version. Open source tends to smooth out the revision process, but it's the same idea.

    Even one-off programming like games is really just a service; it's just done on spec ahead of time, in the hope that people will pay you to instruct their computer how to do stuff (animate aliens decapitating people or whatever) later on. Software was never a "product", and the attempt to sell it as one oughta be pretty much over in five years. And when you think about it it was a pretty short burp - people have been selling the service of computer programming for about fifty years (Ada Lovelace was a volunteer, but the women who figured out how to program the ENIAC were paid, albeit poorly as human adding machines), and we hopefully have thousands of years left to go where people will no longer be able to try and sell it in shrinkwraps. ;)

  • Different tech support needs for Linux and *BSD (Score:4)

    by toh ( 64283 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2000 @04:00PM (#1108900)
    I've set up quite a few production servers with both Linux (usually Debian, for sanity's sake) and FreeBSD (pretty much eclipsed Debian on the server side for me in the last few years), including mail (UUCP and SMTP), file services, firewalls, and even the occasional workstation. I could count the number of hours I've spent troubleshooting FreeBSD problems on one hand, while I've probably racked up a solid week or two of fighting with Linux issues (one of those weeks was spent pretty much exclusively on an $!@!! Adaptec Ultrawide controller and 2.0.x kernel). It's not that Linux isn't cool, it's just that it's often hairy as hell. FreeBSD by comparison has in a sense had much of the tech support work done up front, by making the system lean, trim, fast, and extremely well-organised from the start. You see the same effect of prior planning with the other BSDs, too - security for OpenBSD, portability for NetBSD. Linux by comparison is a bit of a kitchen sink.

    All that translates to less of a need for tech support, but it's just as important to note that what support *is* needed will have to be that much more expert and focused. Not that BSDI will have any problem with that, but there's simply a higher expectation of sanity and function from a FreeBSD sysadmin than a Linux one, kind of like the difference between a Mac and Windoze user where consistency and ease of use are concerned.

  • Who the heck is Chuck [freebsd.org]?
  • Does this mean that users of FreeBSD are more willing to pay for the assurance of support, i.e. an ISP; than a new Linux user who is likely to be a person brave enough to pickup RedHat for home use? time will tell..
  • Linux on the desktop, BSD in the server room? Why?!?

    There is *no reason* to use one of them as desktop, the other as server. If you use one of them, it'd be a waste of resources to do this; you'd better spend your time on only one of them and use both on the server and the desktop.

    Purely as hobby I use both though.

    What Linux can do on the desktop, FreeBSD can too (partially through the excellent Linux emulator that can even run vmware or Oracle or Netscape+plug-ins, i.e. everything that is available for Linux at native speed).

    OTOH, there isn't much difference between both for server stability/performance nowadays (BSD used to lead but with kernel 2.4 coming...). Just use what you like most. Personally I find BSD easier to maintain and keep up-to-date (never had to reinstall in 5 years time; constant incremental updates where possible).

  • Re:MS (Score:1)

    by divec ( 48748 )
    Sig, that was a real pathetic attempt to be cool

    by the usual MS bashing on here.


    I'm not sure why you object so much to the poster's comment.
    It wasn't blind criticism, it was a valid parody of the
    actual "support" you get if you ring MS. Reboot, Reinstall,
    Upgrade. That's the advice you'll recieve much of the time.
  • Are there any commerical support contracts available for the other *BSD variants?
    OpenBSD support can be obtained from NSTI [netsec.net]. They use OpenBSD in their operations and have donated resources to the group.
  • It wasn't meant as a troll, honestly. Just a bit of humor.

    Apparently, my sense of humor (or lack thereof) doesn't translate well over 56K. :)


    Bowie J. Poag
  • For more on what BSDi has planned for FreeBSD and BSD/OS check out:

    http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/news/0,4538,2555 009,00.html

    Steven
    Editor at Large: Sm@rt Reseller

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