Re: Commercial binary support?

On 2003.11.19 14:17 Austin Gonyou wrote:
> All,
>
> I sincerely apologize for possibly starting a flame war, I wasn't aware
> this might be a hot-button issue. Hopefully some good will come of it
> none-the-less, like others who come after me might see the reasons our
> db application developers want this type of "go to" support.
>

No need to apologize Austin.

Let me answer your post also, even though I'm posting late.

We do provide binary support for PostgreSQL and any other open source product
we support even though we don't push it in advertising. When all is said and
done we're only distributing patched binaries and following the changes to
the code base.

The trick in providing binary support is that under our current business model
(cheap, standardized hourly rate), the customer needs to understand that they
are paying us for our time to apply patches, do code reviews, coding etc ...
it's not like a product you get from Oracle where the cost of maintenance is
amortized over all the customers.

The benefit to this approach, however is that our customers get exactly the
changes they want - they actually drive features development by having us
improve the base product for their specific needs.

Richard Schilling