> > Well, I think you'd be in the minority of you don't care if vendors > > officially support Debian. From a commercial perspective, > what happens > > if your tech support department calls up the vendor asking for some > > assistance, and as soon as you tell them you're running > Debian, they > > go all quiet? > > -What- vendor? > > (And, yep, RMS would be proud of my servers. :))
Well, some of us do need Oracle for business reasons. And while I'm an opensource advocate and choose opensource technology whenever it makes sense, Oracle is a darned good database, with fairly good support. (if you can afford it) Now, back on topic, I'm pretty sure that Oracle's unspoken policy is that if you have Oracle on Debian (a non-certified platform according to them) your support contract is still good up to a point. As soon as you run into anything that might be distribution-related Oracle Support will bill you T&M to resolve the issue. ----------------------- Basically, 99% of the time if it works on Redhat or Mandrake or one of the others, you can get it to work on Debian... but when you run into trouble, that's when "certification" becomes important, because the vendor won't talk to you (or as you said, will bill you extra) if your platform is not "certified". They won't guarantee it will work, they won't help you if it doesn't... basically, from a commercial perspective, you'd be left out in the cold if you used a non-certified product. Sometimes the Product Purchases manager (or whoever authorizes purchases in your company) won't even allow you to purchase products that don't get vendor support (and understandably so). It's just like hardware. You have some vendors that do support running their hardware under Linux (3ware comes to mind), but others that won't help unless you are running a "supported" distro (and supported = certified to them).