Support is one of the major reasons stressed for not selecting open source products in a corporate environment. Management wants a major company to support a product. They want someone to sue.

Given the development strategy espoused here, it is clear that a new paradigm for support needs to be developed at most companies.

I work on a company which is a 24/7 operation and very concerned about system reliability and up-time. Many of our service level agreements (SLA's) are for 99.99+ system uptime. The feeling is that, without a viable commercial vendor supporting a product, this can't be met.

I tend to think differently. I'm formulating my thoughts on this, but here are some of my initial impressions.

• Organizations over-engineer things.
  Because of this tendency to complicate simple things, we often develop more problems than we solve. The complexity, itself, causes problems.
  
• Organizations overestimate the SLA.
  We demand unrealistic uptime requirements. This demand leads to the over-engineering, which leads to problems.
  
• Organizations over customize designs.
  Many organizations think that their situation is vastly different from that of everyone else; that their business processes require specialized, highly-customized software to implement it. I believe this is wrong in most cases and leads to software which can't be maintained or which costs much too much to maintain.
  
• Vendor Support is often inadequate.
  This is because of a lack of knowledge and involvement with the product, especially the product in your environment.

So what should your support strategy be? Like lots of things, that depends. But, here are some of my thoughts.

If you have adopted the open source development stragedy which involves you programmers in the development of the sofware, you have built-in support right there. The same mechanism that they use to communicate to the community for development can be turned to maintenance.

Develop expertise and connections in house. If your development staff is involved with the open source community, chances are that they have contacts which will help with any problems.

Buy from companies which support open source. For example, you can purchase Linux support from HP at the same time you purchase the hardware. Thus you obtain support for both the hardware and the operating system from the same vendor.

Purchase support contracts with experts for critical elements of your system. If a particular open source element is critical to your enterprise and you have not developed expertise in house through involvement in the open source community, consider contracting with one of the primary developers of the component through a personal serivces contract.

One of the best ways to support Open Source software is to join the open source community. By doing this, you build your own expertise and you can help shape the direction of the open source software to your needs. (See the discussion on open source development.)

The major strength of open source software is the community which uses and supports it. For most pieces of major software, there are large communities which are using and developing the software. They interact through web sites, news groups, discussion boards, chats, instant messaging, and more.

When a problem develops with open source software, it has often been encountered by a number of persons around the world. They pool their resources and the resources of the software developers to solve the problem. This method can be more effective than commercial support in solving the problem or answering the question.

As an example, I have recently been involved in the upgrade of a major commercial content management system. We have run into a problem which caused us to abort and role back the upgrade. It has been over TWO MONTHS and the support group have not solved the problem. We cannot proceed and are currently on an unsupported version of the software! I have never run into this type of problem with open source software.

Of course, working with a community such as this does take a different mind set. You have to be willing to develop your own in-house expertise. You will probably need to have or hire programmers to make the fixes, but you will be able to implement and fixes more quickly than with commercial vendors.

The question arises, who has the liability when the software fails? As with any commercial system, the ultimate answer is you.

This question stops many commercial companies from using open source software. They feel they have no one to sue when something goes wrong. But, have you ever read commercial software license agreements? It appears that you are using commercial software at your own risk anyway! I'm not sure that open source software is any better.