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Contents 
Introduction
From zero to support team
Closing the skills gap
The personal approach
And then there's the desktop
A strategy for open source |
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Given the ongoing uncertainty over availability of Linux skills, many early adopters are taking the build-their-own approach to open source. Training existing engineers in the ways and means of the new paradigm -- and bringing many closet open source advocates out of the cold to assume proper roles as support technicians -- has become another viable option for large companies keen to mitigate the risks of uncertain open source support.
At the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), open source has become a way of life. After years of developing with Linux and other open source tools, the RTA last year passed the point-of-no-return with open source -- it began a refresh of its desktop fleet that's eventually expected to put more than 3000 Linux desktops in front of its users.
RTA CIO Greg Carvouni says the RTA expects to trim desktop management costs by 20 percent through changes such as the replacement of Microsoft Office with Sun Microsystems StarOffice -- a supported version of the open-source OpenOffice.
Longtime partners Sun and Apple are providing some support, but on the whole, the RTA has kept its support capabilities inhouse, to be managed by its team of more than 200 IT staff. "There is a constant cost in a largish environment of doing upgrades sometimes for little benefit other than to maintain vendor support. But with open source you can drive your own show," says Carvouni.
"It is still early days, and there's not a large systems integration community out there to help you in [open source]. It's a bit chicken-and-egg: until there are more people doing this, it's not really a viable business for [integrators] to become experts at it. On the other hand, if there's no integration help, people that are less capable of running it all on their own are going to have a hard time making it a success. It is better to have some vendor support if you can get it."
Attempts to build internal open source centres-of-excellence will expose aspiring open source customers to the same skills limitations facing larger vendors and systems integrators. Hiring support staff with Linux skills is expensive and time-consuming, and training existing staff members takes time and ongoing financial investment.
Even worse, keeping such staff from being poached by open-source service providers can be extremely difficult, particularly if the Linux market continues to heat up as expected and vendors become desperate to chase lucrative contracts. Such costs must be factored into TCO and ROI calculations being undertaken by any company contemplating an open source investment.
In the long term, Novell's Lenz believes the Linux skills market will normalise as the number of trainees catches up with growing demand. In the meantime, he says supplementing external support capabilities with internal open source skills is a good stopgap.
"As organisations get a better understanding of Linux and what it can do, we will see a further expansion of the Linux capabilities within these organisations," he says. "This may create some issues around recruitment, but as the supply increases I think the demand for resources will increase as well."
I think this was a pretty negatively-focused article (e.g., starting with a case study of one person's bad experience). It discusses the issue of what are the pitfalls are of linux again and again yet provides little clue as to why people are interested in linux, i.e., the positives in using it. Successes are barely mentioned. What about the horror stories using windows that cause people to leave windows for linux? That is just as relevant to the author's story. And I have heard many horror stories of Microsoft's (and other propietary, non-open source vendor) support. Apache (open-source) is the most widely used web server software out there.