The Quandary over Open Source Support

"If you're like a lot of IT organizations, you've got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere. For good measure let's throw in a few databases from MySQL that occasionally take a virtual table or two from your SQL Server farms – and let's not forget to mention the Oracle database that runs your CRM software. To top things off you're running a slew of other open and closed source software that all together keeps your business running.

"Welcome to the current state of IT. So here's the question – how many people know your entire topology and can support all that stuff? Most likely you don't have one team that understands the way you do business. More likely, you have a handful of internal and external teams for each application. That makes you especially dependent on the support you get from your vendors.

"Software companies, especially open source ones, live on support contracts."

Complete Story

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