"More than five years ago the launch of Microsoft Windows XP - and its considerably improved features and reliability compared with Windows 98 and 2000 - made a comprehensive desktop rollout a no-brainer for companies. The other options were all far from desirable. Now, as the world gears up for the launch of Windows Vista, the conclusion may not be so cut and dry. Certainly, Vista is set to be feature-packed and reliable, and many companies will move to the new platform as a matter of course. However, Linux has come a long way in five years, with the concerted effort of hobbyists around the world supplemented by the resources of tech heavyweights to push its desktop features to near-parity with Windows XP."
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-07-06
It's good to see that there are some companies who provide support contracts. Unfortunately, I don't consider community forums to be equivalent to that of a support contract.
My friend who works for Business Objects is one of the telephone support operators for the entire Business Objects SDK. He talks to developers from other companies who have trouble implementing some thing or other with the SDK. Most of these companies have an unlimited-support contract they buy yearly, and he says that the average cost of one of those is high tens of thousands of dollars. This is big money, and big support that we're talking about.
Microsoft has these kind of support contracts. So does Sun. So does IBM. I'm looking for an equivalent for Linux.
Member since:2005-06-29
You want a proramming toolkit that comes with support and don't care if it costs tens of thousands of dollars? Have you considered Trolltech's Qt?
By the way, it's becomming apparent that you're prodding around for some part of Linux that you think we can't defend. Your questions and claims are floating from one part of the OS to the next with striking similarity to a process of elimination. When you find that weakness don't expect us to give a damn, we all know Linux isn't perfect ,just like any OS, and we happily use it anyway.
Member since:
2005-06-29
Just about every distributor out there offers their own support contracts, the prices can be very competitive as long as you go with one for one that sells to the market you fit in. If you don't want those you can always find some others, Google can help with that.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=linux+support+contracts&btnG=Go...
A quick glance at the results looking for an example yileded theese pages, and there's a lot more of you go through all the search results.
http://www.linuxbox.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Support+Contracts
http://www.linuxvoodoo.com/support/non-commercial-support.php
http://www.linuxnovice.org/main_support.php3
The really interesting thing is that with some distributions you can get very good levels of technical support for free just out of the community forums.