Commercial support

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2005-05-03 at 13:33 +0200, Andreas Mohr wrote:
> > But I prefer to not have any such list at all, something needing support 
> > for wine will,find it....
> Again rather strong disagreement.
> As discussed on wineconf2005, wine has a severe market acceptance/perception
> issue, thus having strong support options seems to be quite important.
> 
> While a ranked list might not be the best way to represent support options,
> I think it allows companies such as Codeweavers which are obviously
> much more involved with Wine to properly represent their Wine knowledge
> level.

I think it is worthwhile to expand on the Samba Team's experience with
commercial support lists.

The primary experience is that such lists much be maintained, and
current.  For many years, our list was unmaintained, but over the last
year we have had a new website maintainer, and at least companies that
don't reply to e-mail are removed.  

We do not 'vet' our list, and we don't try to rank the providers.  This
avoids a number of issues (how would you rank them?), and this is a
policy I support.  

We have a broad list of providers in many localities, and this does
provide us a place to point users in need of paid help.  I don't think
it draws away from the 'top tier' providers, who distinguish themselves
in the way they always have - by being relevant to their customers, and
competing on their own best merits.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College  http://hawkerc.net
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