Re: Commercial support

[MediaHost (TM)]

Shachar Shemesh wrote: MediaHost (TM) wrote: Wine is going to play a major role by Linux Vendors, where support is the major income; it does it already now. Wine is integrated into migration plans quite tightly for applications with no alternative around. Now, a company giving support for wine should have enough experience and support personnel in both, Linux and Wine in order to qualify, if at all. I guess that would have been true, if Wine did not need so much work still. At the moment, I really don't see how you can give support for Wine without being able to work out areas where Wine is simply not good enough. There is no better way to show you can than to actually have done such a thing in the past, hence the patches suggestion. I understand, that wine needs still way to go and development time is not the cheapest thing on earth (A way to get more patches in:-)). Your suggestion concerning patches might be half correct: To hack up wine for certain needs and applications is, in my opinion, not the only qualification needed, it's one of them...Now, if you submitted a patch before, doesn't mean, you can give serious support for wine enabled solutions.... That's why I said, it's a dangerous thing to post such a list....why? To list anybody might work like a boomerang, if the listed entity is not capable of doing the job. This might be very counterproductive for wine and in effect make you look like a fool.... The intention is meant well, but still... And who is going to judge that issue?? Is money, little or much, the green card to winehq's supporting companies list?? Anyway, I see it as a problematic issue at large....and might do more harm than good.... But than again, the question remains, who to list!? Does submitting a patch qualify for better listing? I don't think there is any connection between them...coding is coding and support issues are something else.... In my experience, you can solve 0% of enterprise support requests (which is what commercial support about) without doing some level of hacking on Wine. I'd love to hear Jeremy's input on that one, as they have MUCH more experience at it then we. It may be that it's just because we know how to hack wine that we resort to that. Then again, that does mean the customer gets a different level of support from companies that have wine hacking abilities and companies that don't. Either way, telling site visitors who can and who can't seems like useful information to me. But I prefer to not have any such list at all, something needing support for wine will find it.... But, as discussed at WineConf, not having such a list at all hurts wine, which is clearly not what we are trying to do.          Shachar -- Regards   Signer:      Eddy Nigg Company: StartCom Linux at www.startcom.org                 MediaHost™ at www.mediahost.org Skype:      startcom Phone:      +1.213.341.0390   Import StartCom Public CA

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