Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 02:09:19 +0200 From: Julian Howard Stacey <jhs@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> To: velte@cdrom.com, current@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: A Scenario for FreeBSD Commercial Support Message-ID: <199504210009.CAA08309@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 19 Apr 1995 14:43:58 %2B0200." <18149.798295438@freefall.cdrom.com>
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To Jack Velte (WC Inc) & Folk On FreeBSD Current list.
Jordan wrote:
>Subject: Re: Minutes of the Thursday, April 13th core team meeting in Berkeley.
>Support Mgr[10]: vacant (possibly PAY someone)
You'd have to pay someone, I can't see anyone properly doing a full time
high-availability support job for free, unless he's a millionaire who loves
stress, hard work, & agravation :-) Someone with a real job or study load
would not have sufficient time.
FreeBSD Support could be a 24 hour/day job:
- We have users spread round the planet,
- Thanks to some people's interaction through Internet, & many people's
copious coffee drinking, I suspect in most timezones of the world,
we have users working probably 18 hours out of every 24 hours
(assuming the 2am-8am period to be slack), (& not 5 but 7 days/week)
Given sufficient cash, I'd suggest at least Three support people !
meta-physically living about 8 timezones apart (eg: USA, Europe &
Australia/Japan)> (though 2 might be on same continent (USA ?) if
(a) one worked the `graveyard shift'
(b) preferably we had a few local incoming auto-divert
phone numbers on each continental land mass, to establish
pseudo `local' presence.
Any paid support FreeBSD offered would have to make sense to whoever
sponsored us to provide it. At present this means it would have to make
commercial sense to Walnut Creek (currently our sole sponsor I believe).
Jack Velte of WC Inc must be used to crystal ball gazing on prospective
CD-ROM sales quantities versus marketing & support effort.
One question for him is:
If FreeBSD provided Walnut with `ready to press' CD-ROM
trees every 13 weeks, could WC Inc sell sufficent CD-ROMs
to pay staffing costs of (aprox) :-
a few assorted support folk (mostly full time),
a Release Engineeer (5 weeks in every 13 ?),
a Jordan-like-jack-of-all-trades (full time),
kernel-gurus-&-whoever-else-ive-missed ;-)
We could boost CD-ROM sales & CD-subscriptions like this:
"Yes Sir/Madam, of course the Support Desks run the latest CD release.
What is the Serial number stamped on the `Free Support' sticker
on your Jewel Case ?"
"Sorry Sir/Madam, Walnut do not contract us to provide _free_
support for old CD-ROMS, the new one has been out longer than
the 4 week changeover period, & we don't run the old software.
I advise you to phone Walnut & order either the current CD
(with 13 week support), or an ongoing subscription (with ongoing
support), then phone me back if you have a problem
with the currently valid release."
"Yes Sir, you're of course free to email `hackers' & ask for help,
(if you want to, if your email works), some of those guys run
from CD's much older than yours, & some from much newer sources
than the CD you still need to buy, just remember those guys aren't
paid to help you, so be grateful if someone offers free advice for
problems based on your out-of-date CD.
"May I give you Walnut's Tel. Order Number ? .... Good Luck Sir"
WC Inc would benefit most from offering Primary worldwide support,
to solve the `Ring Ring .. Hallo ? ... Help , It won't boot !' scenario's,
thus assisting sales of further CD's to friends & colleagues of folk
who had initial booting problems.
Later fine tuning support/consultancy is not in WC's interest to pay to
support, & would cost a fortune, either the user should make a direct contract
with local support personnel, or he should work on it himself, enlisting the
support of our existing mail lists.
I'd define Primary Support as:
help in getting it to boot, & to send mail to enroll on hackers,
Further `free' support (ie paid for by WC Inc) would be of less benefit to WC.
Are the folks in FreeBSD agreeable to a regular 13 week release schedule,
if the `grunt work' is offloaded onto paid help ? (We'd need 13 week releases
to fund proper support)
Would FreeBSD worry about geting over dependent on WC Inc ?
I'd be interested in doing Paid support in Europe - But Not For Free !.
If I were to do FreeBSD support, I'd order at least a 3rd phone line,
(& perhaps a leased IP line) (fortunately I had the extra cable laid
through the concrete building recently) :-
1 New line for the FreeBSD hackers who never sleep, & are likely to
phone at the most inconvenient times (they have so far ;-).
1 line for fax + getty modem
(serviced of course, not by a `Development' box, but by
a seperate box running the latest Quarterly Release CD-ROM.
1 line for existing friends & local customers (& spare modem)
(for the people one wants to hear from, even After doing
a day's support work)
---
Julian Stacey <jhs@freebsd.org> Tel. +49 89 268616. Fax Modem: 2608126
Vector Systems Ltd: an Internet, Unix & C systems consultancy.
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