Re: Commercial support, was Re: [HACKERS] v6.4.3 ?

Terry Mackintosh wrote:

>
> Hi all
>
> > >     That's  the  reason.  One  of  the  biggest drawbacks against
> > >     Postgres is (for many companies at least), that you can't buy
> > >     support.
>
> IMHO ...
>
> Well, yes one can, one may just need to look around a bit... and pay
> commercial support prices.
>
> Example:
> As for my self I feel confident that I could provide such support, having
> been using Postgres+ since Postgres 0.95? (3?4 years ago?).  I charge
> $25/hour, but have been considering going to $30/hour. While I've yet to
> get a PostgreSQL specific job, I have had some other Linux based jobs.
>
> [...]

    Nice idea.

    But a word of caution seems appropriate.

    Commercial  support  doesn't  mean  only  that  you  can hire
    someone who takes care about your actual  problems  with  the
    product.  It also means that there is someone you can bill if
    that product caused big damage to you (product warranty).

    Commercial support doesn't mean only that you hire someone on
    a  T/M  base  (time and material). It also means that you can
    sign a support contract  with  a  regular  payment  and  have
    written  down  response-  and  maximum  problem-to-fix times,
    escalation levels etc.

    For these issues (and there  are  more)  you  would  need  an
    assurance  in  the  background  (or  a big company). But this
    requires that you have quality assurance management on top of
    the  development.  And that you have aggreed procedures where
    escalation  levels  from  your  support  activate  the   core
    developers  in  specified  times  to  solve problems.  And it
    requires that you have more  precise  product  specifications
    telling  what  the  product  can  and  where it's limits are.
    Otherwise you wouldn't be able to pay the assurance.

    There are already distributions of Linux out  where  you  can
    buy  commercial  support  with  them.  They  stay  behind the
    bleeding edge of development and are  offered  by  companies,
    that  have their own development team apart from the internet
    community.

    Looking at how we are organized (or better unorganized),  all
    this high level commercial support seems far away.


Jan

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