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

Jan,My company Rakekniven provides professional support
packages for our business line of PostgreSQL servers. But
this is in addition to our servers that we build and test
by hand. In other words, the servers that we warranty
have been thoroughly tested (a generation behind) and are
a combination of hardware/software that we feel comfortable
with. Needless to say we spell out in detail, in the
maintenance contract, what the limitations of the software
are and what actions we are willing to provide to the
customer, including, replacing the server.But you must also remember that all software companies,
including Microsoft, warrant only the media the software
comes on and take absolutely no responsibility for the
use (damage) that may arise from using the software. Take
a look at one of your professional software licenses and
read it. You will find that according to these licenses
that most commercial software is no better than shareware
(License wise).
That's why, in the licenses, you see these big clauses 
that say this software is not suitable for use in Nuclear 
Power reactor's, etc... As an example, read one of IBM's
Mainframe License's, IBM only guaranties that the hardware
is free from all major defect's, without defining what those
defect's are. And IBM reserved the right to replace that
hardware at there discretion.

D. Gowin

-----Original Message-----
From: jwieck@debis.com [mailto:jwieck@debis.com]
Sent: Monday, February 08, 1999 9:12 AM
To: terry@terrym.com
Cc: hackers@postgreSQL.org
Subject: 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
(productwarranty).
 
   Commercial support doesn't mean only that you hire someone on   a  T/M  base  (time and material). It also means
thatyou can   sign a support contract  with  a  regular  payment  and  have   written  down  response-  and  maximum
problem-to-fixtimes,   escalation levels etc.
 
   For these issues (and there  are  more)  you  would  need  an   assurance  in  the  background  (or  a big company).
Butthis   requires that you have quality assurance management on top of   the  development.  And that you have aggreed
procedureswhere   escalation  levels  from  your  support  activate  the   core   developers  in  specified  times  to
solveproblems.  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
behindthe   bleeding edge of development and are  offered  by  companies,   that  have their own development team apart
fromthe internet   community.
 
   Looking at how we are organized (or better unorganized),  all   this high level commercial support seems far away.


Jan

--

#======================================================================#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.                                  #
#======================================== jwieck@debis.com (Jan Wieck) #

Dan Gowin wrote:
>         But you must also remember that all software companies,
> including Microsoft, warrant only the media the software
> comes on and take absolutely no responsibility for the
> use (damage) that may arise from using the software. Take
> a look at one of your professional software licenses and
> read it. You will find that according to these licenses
> that most commercial software is no better than shareware
> (License wise).

That's not necessarily true.  While it is almost always true for
consumer-off-the-shelf software, there is plenty of software that
doesn't fit into that category.  Quite a few software companies will
sign support contracts (IBM is one) where they will take responsibility
for damage that may arise from the use of the software.  This is also
the case for many industrial software packages.  Granted, PostgreSQL
doesn't really fall into any of these categories, but these types of
warratees *do* exist.

-- 
Nick Bastin - RBB Systems, Inc.
Out hme0, through the Cat5K, Across the ATM backbone, through the
firewall, past the provider, hit the router, down the fiber, off another
router... Nothing but net.

>Nick Bastin - RBB Systems, Inc.
>Out hme0, through the Cat5K, Across the ATM backbone, through the
>firewall, past the provider, hit the router, down the fiber, off another
>router... Nothing but net.
>Nick,
>
>That's not necessarily true.  While it is almost always true for
>consumer-off-the-shelf software, there is plenty of software that
>doesn't fit into that category.  Quite a few software companies will
>sign support contracts (IBM is one) where they will take responsibility
>for damage that may arise from the use of the software.  This is also
>the case for many industrial software packages.  Granted, PostgreSQL
>doesn't really fall into any of these categories, but these types of
>warratees *do* exist.
>
Nick, I didn't say that those contracts don't exist. But
they are usually in conjunction with some specific application.
For example, Oracle's general license on there database
product's is written in such a way that they cannot be
held accountable for anything a customer may do with there
database. The reason's are simple, Oracle couldn't possibly
come up with all of the possible scenario's that their
general purpose software could fail in. But, on the flip side, Oracle has an Iron clad warranty 
on the use of "Oracle Financials". And you can be assured
what a DBA can and cannot do are very strictly defined within
that contract. And if you violate that contract in any minor
way and "Oracle Financials" has any problem, the lawyer's
will use this as a way out.As for comparing commercial database software to PostgreSQL
reliability. I had to rebuild a Oracle 7.0 database engine
two weeks ago because it was corrupt. And last week I spent
two days exporting/importing a Oracle 7.3 two tablespaces 
because of some corruption of some type. And I did this
after Oracle's tech staff suggested it. What does all of this mean. Well, Oracle (Commercial)
database packages have some of these same problems that plague
PostgreSQL. The only difference is they are less frequent and
are generally tied to the development cycle. I tend to think
of this as a evolution cycle and Postgres's cycle is on 
steroids.


My two cents.
D.

Dan Gowin <DGowin@avantec.net> writes:
>     What does all of this mean. Well, Oracle (Commercial)
> database packages have some of these same problems that plague
> PostgreSQL. The only difference is they are less frequent and
> are generally tied to the development cycle. I tend to think
> of this as a evolution cycle and Postgres's cycle is on 
> steroids.

That it is.

I think most people see rapid release cycles as part of the success
story for open-source software, so I'm not eager to try to slow down
the cycle.  But we do need to consider that many users of Postgres
will be more concerned about stability and reliability than having
the latest whizzy features.  Making a commitment to maintain the
prior major release as well as the current one seems like a good
answer.

I see a number of different specific issues that are getting lumped
together under the notion of "commercial support":

1. Personal attention to a particular installation, guaranteed
response to a problem, etc.  These are things that can and should
be handled by a distributed network of support consultants as Terry
was suggesting.

2. Bug fixing and feature additions in the supported product.  (This
is different from "support" in the sense of correcting an admin's
mistake, figuring out a workaround, or otherwise supporting a specific
installation.  I'm thinking about changes that require developer-grade
understanding of the code.)  I don't really think we need to do
anything differently here, other than have a higher level of effort on
back-patching prior releases.  Like most open-source projects we are
far *better* than commercial practice in this area.

3. Commercial guarantees/warrantees/indemnifications, ie, someone pays
you money if the thing doesn't work for you.  I don't think this is
going to happen, at least not for the core Postgres development.  Who
in their right mind would warrantee something they didn't have 100%
control over?  If there's really a demand for it then probably
companies will offer packages based on back-rev Postgres releases that
they have tested like mad and hired a few programmers specifically to
fix bugs in.  (They'd probably want to put it on a back-rev OS,
too...)

We should try to encourage qualified people to become support
consultants to deal with point #1.  I don't think this group can
or should do anything about #3 though --- that looks like a splinter
project to me.  I don't mind someone else taking it up, but it would
be a distraction from the core development project for us.
        regards, tom lane