The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: FWD: Linux certification

> Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org> writes:
> 
> > Eeek. This is really disgusting IMHO.
> 
> The whole thing's made my skin crawl since people first started
> talking about it.

Same here.  Since I'm planning on earning some money doing Linux
consulting and support - I was a bit interested.

I subscribed to their mailing list just to see if anything
good would come out of it - but I haven't been impressed.

Rob Hart and the Red Hat guys solicited input via their list -- and then
mostly ignored it and came out with their own program.

Some of the key points:

 * a bug-tracking system 
     - but only for the "support providers" (on a secure server)
 * On-line searchable problem/solution database
     - I guess these would be HOWTO's only for "support providers" 
 * Red Hat will fix bugs in any software
     Critical bugs - they will report back every day
     Severe bugs - they will report back every two days
     Nagging bugs - they will pass it on to the maintainer
 * Open ended support from Red Hat
     - Red Hat will provide assistance to all of the "support providers"
     - Red Hat will charge the support program the cost of providing
       this assistance - which will be recovered from the fees charged
       for the program 
 * Support providers will be required to register each individual 
   client machine for which they provide Red Hat support.
     - the fees for the program will be based on how many CPU's each
       "support provider" has under management at their clients
 * A Certification program - 3 levels - with hundreds of tests
     - this looks like it would be quite expensive to build and
       operate

IMHO, the whole scheme seems doomed.  There are 200 people subscribed
to the mailing list, but I wonder how many of them are like me - just
lurking.  They'd be lucky to get 10 people to sign up for the program.

Debian has proved that an open bug system works wonders.  A closed bug
system like he's proposing is going to be vastly inferior.  Especially
if there are only 10 people submitting bugs.

Why would anybody write a HOWTO who's audience is just a few fellow
"solution providers"?  Anybody who is going to go to the effort of 
writing a HOWTO-like document would be better off contributing it to
the LDP project.

Part of the program will be that Red Hat will fix bugs.  But don't they
do this already?  It looks like they will only be responsible for fixing
security bugs and the like (as they do now).  The big difference I can
see is that now they would have somewhere else to charge their costs
against.

It seems to me that the primary purpose of the program is so that 
Red Hat can say that "real" support is available.  They currently
have a free e-mail based trouble ticket system for registered
owners of their products -- but it doesn't work very well.

It seems like the Red Hat guys don't want to change the way they
work to accomodate such a program.  Rob Hart is willing to run a
program for them - loosely based on how some other commercial vendors
support programs work.  But I think his plans are overly grandiose.
Building a program as he envisions could cost them $100-200k.  If 
they only get 10 people to sign up - they'd have to charge $10-20k
for each person.  And it wouldn't be substantially better than
what you get with Debian for free.

Frankly, the Linux support market is quite small and undeveloped.
Part of the problem (??) is that Linux itself is very supportable: 
 - bugs are quite short-lived
 - anyone can e-mail the author of a particular program/driver directly   
 - source code is available
  
So most consulting/support work consists of:  mucking around with 
flaky hardware, customer education and hand-holding, plus
offloading/out-sourcing of system administration and development.  The
proposed Red Hat program doesn't really help out with any of that.

What would really be beneficial to Linux consultants in place of a
certification program would be a Logo program with bit of "peer review"
thrown in as well.  And it would cost almost nothing to implement.

Cheers,

 - Jim

Attachment: pgpwFmEmlNuAC.pgp
Description: PGP signature