enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[ballock <boleslaw.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

> As a guideline, Canonical supports packages which were compiled and 
> tested by Canonical and for which there it the full "engineering 
> chain" backing the package life cycle. This is roughly equivalent to 
> the Main software repository ("Main" as opposed to "Universe").
> [...]
> In all cases, Canonical tries to see if there is anything that can be 
> done, no promises made though. For example, for a proprietary NVidia 
> driver problem, Canonical can try to get in touch with the makers of 
> that drivers. Or for a package in Universe, Canonical can try to 
> facilitate the communication with the maintainer.
Well, our Ubuntu project in Tieto would be totally dead if we only used 
the Main archive.

External support is one of my pain points - I would like to shift 
responsibility to the supporting company, but either there is none or I 
am not treated seriously.

It is much easier with OSS. If you don't like the support provided by 
the vendor, you can either fix it yourself or pay a third-party to have 
it fixed.

I will not name the companies that we pay a lot of money for support 
contract or we are even partners with and we can not get the attention 
required to have their closed-source software fixed.

> > The case of using MS Office on our Ubuntu machines was discussed in
> > Tieto. We discussed the option of using Crossover by buying their
> > support subscription or by using an unsupported Wine wrapper. Crossover
> > was too expensive, the nightmare of supporting people with Office
> > application crashing ourselves was not compelling either.
>
> Depending on the needs, it might be entirely possible that a 
> cloud-based solution is ideal in this case. Something like Office 365, 
> which requires only a browser and means zero hassle on the client side.
>
> It could even be feasible/desirable  for the Windows machines in the 
> estate.
Office 365 is not an option, we have confidentiality rules that do not 
allow us to put anything outside the company, be it rot13-encrypted or 
not. We will be using Citrix cloud for that, but I am not recommending 
any particular cloud solution, as I believe there is no perfect candidate.

Actually I hope to get feedback from people using VMware or RedHat's VDI 
or any other cloud solution.
> > Personally I would love to see contract's price tags, but I don't think
> > this would ever happen on a wiki.
>
> Prices are here: https://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=41
"To buy more than 10 desktop support contracts please contact us 
<https://forms.canonical.com/sales/>."

That's the most common thing you will read on any website. The prices 
vary greatly by amount, if you want to know the estimate you need to 
send a quote request anyway. That's why I said I don't think this would 
ever happen.

Actually I would really love to see price tag comparison of this VAS/DAS 
with Beyondtrust, Likewise and Centrify. As there seems to be no 
reasonably-working AD authentication officially supported in Main, it 
would be good to know the price tags there. It will not happen.

Cheers,
Ballock