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Date:      Sun, 10 Dec 1995 12:35:40 -0500
From:      dennis@etinc.com (dennis)
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        julian@freefall.freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FBSD support inc. 
Message-ID:  <199512101735.MAA28497@etinc.com>

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Jordan writes....

>Julian Elischer writes...
>> I've been thinking about setting up a company (actually more than one)
>> to give commercial support for freeBSD.
>
>I think this is a fine idea, and not exactly one we haven't been over
>before, but I still wouldn't want to start with quite so complicated a
>picture as this.
>
>When you're selling support, you're selling a service that *has* to
>work for each and every customer who's forked over good money for it
>or the whole thing breaks down and you've got the better business
>bureau calling you on the phone (or worse, somebody's legal dept).
>This means that it's got to be possible to quantify just how long any
>given service call will take to respond to and also to make sure that
>each and every call is tracked and resolved properly.  Even simply
>measuring this is non-trivial, and the difficulty increases
>exponentially with the number of staff (and cubed by their distance
>from you).  You also want to be able to easily determine where you're
>spending the most money and time since support will eat you up (and
>make you unprofitable) very quickly if you don't keep things carefully
>streamlined.

I want to point out some of the less obvious issues with such an endeavor,
not just in providing the service but regarding the impact that it might have on
the image of FreeBSD. There are clear problems with the whole concept, 
and I also think that you might by overestimating the value of support for a non
commercial product.

This issue with "free" products is not necessarily that there is no support,
but that there is no reasonable expectation that all included features of the
product will work well, and that there is a questionable future and no business
plan for the product. Basically, the issue is that there are no guarantees that
anything will work, and I don't think that your "support" proposal will
change that
in any way unless you are willing to support (and be willing to take the
heat) when
virtually anything doesn't work.

A real danger is that the "free" list support that is now available (and
quite good)
will diminish because many of the good contributors will be bound to a 
commercial obligation. This could hurt the positive word of mouth that
points out
that the list support for FreeBSD is in many ways better than the commercial 
support provided by other UNIX vendors. There is also a widespread understanding
that UN*X support generally sucks, even when you pay a LOT for it, and its
certainly
no worse than what you get  from Microsoft with their new 900 numbers.
Success is
much more about marketing than it is support. (i.e. Microsoft) The fact that
support
exists is a good marketing issue,  but I don't think that people who are
trying FreeBSD
are junking it because the support is no good. Substantial hand-holding is a
thing of 
the past....if the product doesn't work out of the box you basically lose.
Remember that
3rd party contracts are only generally purchased AFTER the customer decides they
will use the product. In order to be successful, you will have to have your
own release
 (Caldera, Red Hat...sound familiar?) or count on other people to get the
customers
up and running....which is by far the most time-consuming aspect of support.
Remember
that virutally all commercial products include installation support....how
will you handle this
for a "free" product?

I think that a product is either commercial or its not commercial, and
unless you
can guarantee that some set of features works and will continue to work, you
will
have difficulty having much impact. The bridge from non-commercial to commercial
involves a lot more than just getting a bunch of people together with a
dial-up or
ISDN connection.

Remember also that you will be supporting much more than just a SCSI driver
or a mail reader, you will be expected to support complex networking issues that
require much more than a single machine in someone's basement.  People will
want to know why BGP4 on gateD doesn't work well with a wellfleet router, and 
why their ISDN connections drop off intermittently when and only when
connecting to some obscure version of NT server.  They won't be happy if you
tell
them that one or more of their issues isn't supported, even if its well
mapped out
in a contract. We have 30 PCs in our lab, Pentiums, 486's, 386's with LAN
monitors, 
serial data scopes, various CSU/DSUs and modems, 10 baseT, BNC, AUI, every 
kind of cable, etc, etc just to support a couple of  WAN cards (and Jordan wants
to know why they cost more than $120.).

Support is no simple task. It is by far the most time consuming aspect of our 
business. Designing cards, software....easy stuff. But once you make a sale
you're
obligated to help that customer no matter how stupid and annoying he or she is.
Just be prepared.


Dennis
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