Commercial support

[Shachar Shemesh]

MediaHost (TM) wrote:

> Wine is going to play a major role by Linux Vendors, where support is 
> the major income; it does it already now. Wine is integrated into 
> migration plans quite tightly for applications with no alternative 
> around. Now, a company giving support for wine should have enough 
> experience and support personnel in both, Linux and Wine in order to 
> qualify, if at all.

I guess that would have been true, if Wine did not need so much work 
still. At the moment, I really don't see how you can give support for 
Wine without being able to work out areas where Wine is simply not good 
enough. There is no better way to show you can than to actually have 
done such a thing in the past, hence the patches suggestion.

> But than again, the question remains, who to list!? Does submitting a 
> patch qualify for better listing? I don't think there is any 
> connection between them...coding is coding and support issues are 
> something else....

In my experience, you can solve 0% of enterprise support requests (which 
is what commercial support about) without doing some level of hacking on 
Wine. I'd love to hear Jeremy's input on that one, as they have MUCH 
more experience at it then we.

It may be that it's just because we know how to hack wine that we resort 
to that. Then again, that does mean the customer gets a different level 
of support from companies that have wine hacking abilities and companies 
that don't. Either way, telling site visitors who can and who can't 
seems like useful information to me.

> But I prefer to not have any such list at all, something needing 
> support for wine will find it....

But, as discussed at WineConf, not having such a list at all hurts wine, 
which is clearly not what we are trying to do.

          Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
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