[vox-outreach] Speaker possibility as GTC

[Michael Wenk]

On Tuesday 27 April 2004 12:04 am, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 11:50:13PM -0700, Michael Wenk wrote:
> > So you'll need to show that first it is not as steep a learning
> > curve as they think it is, and second that if their personnell need
> > training its available and costs are reasonable(Are they?)
>
> I was asking myself that with regard to the "MS Office 2003 vs. OO.org"
> comparison article on eWeek (mentioned by Slashdot today, I believe).
>
> One of the cons they listed for OOo was lack of support, since it's
> "volunteer driven."  All you get is disconnected online resources.  *shrug*
>
>
> Is this actually true?  Are there not companies which provide commercial
> support for OOo (and StarOffice), at a price?  (Just as you'd pay for
> MSOffice)

I'm sure that there are commercially available training and support for OOo, 
or at least I would be shocked if there were none at all.  At the same time, 
I remember from my stint working at a union for government employees, and in 
the fringes of government that when you wanted to change packages or 
systems(I cant recall a specific time/case where I recommended OSS directly, 
but I did once try to go from an expensive digital system to a more 
reasonable Sun system and got shot down heavily) you were more often as not 
shot down due to support costs and not the actual license fees for the 
package.  And in at least one case, it didn't seem to matter that we saved 
40K overall, cuz our training costs were way(10-15K beyond a 7.5k budget) 
past allotment.  I didn't do much work with the raw numbers myself, tho I did 
see the summaries.. 

Ironically that's one reason I'm glad I'm not doing sys admin work 
anymore.  :-) 

Mike

-- 
wenk@praxis.homedns.org
Mike Wenk