Re: GNOME deployments

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Toady wrote:
> David Neary a écrit:
> - What kind of support for Gnome they can have (who should they ask, 
> pay... ?)

That is the really great part of the Belgian story - they payed a
local company to do the installation and training (15 days, for a
cost of 9000 euros), and they get all of their support from the
Brussels LUG - I think their CTO is a geek who is a member of the
LUG.

The Brussels LUG are very pleased, because they can present this
company as a community supported private entity, the company is
happy, they're getting good service for low cost (they pay a
party for the LUG now and again, and sponsor them).

Of course, every town has its specialists in Free Software who
can assure a level of service and crisis intervention. Often
Apache, Tomcat and other applications are maintained by companies
(such as mine) who sell applications based on these platforms,
and there is an unwritten agreement that we take care of
infrastructure too. In Lyon, there are 3 or 4 companies who are
capable of providing local service to companies. 

If you're a big fish, and you want support from a big fish, theer
are always Sun, Novell and RedHat, the three big guns of the
GNOME world.

> - How can they learn using Gnome (a "Gnome for dummies" book ?) ?

The GNOME users documentation is of a pretty high standard. There
isn't a printed support yet and there should be - it is a real
benefit of Firefox, IMHO.

> - How did the success story became a success : what kind of people to 
> hire ? how they convinced the local authorities ? where did they get the 
> money for ?

For this story, it was a real partnership between a local user
group and a company - that's the success here, and it really
shows one of our key advantages - community. In Sao Paolo the
success is that GNOME and Free Software allows hundreds of
thousands of people access to technology that they otherwise
couldn't have - again, the community and inclusiveness of GNOME
and free software in general is the thing that stands out.

You're right though - when we include success stories on the web
page, we should search for the hook in the story - the thing that
makes the story remarkable, and that supports the central theme
of "Software for everybody".

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
        David Neary,
        Lyon, France
   E-Mail: bolsh gimp org
CV: http://dneary.free.fr/CV/