Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

Here is what I find interesting. Canonical is offering support at no cost.

http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-th...

That is very very interesting. Canonical's business is the selling of support services and yet they are giving away support in an effort to sweeten the adoption deal. Very interesting. How exactly does Canonical plan to make money in the long term and be a sustainable business if they have to give away their own support services as part of large scale Ubuntu desktop deployments? This certainly can't be a sustainable business model...giving away support services. It certainly makes sense as a short term measure to undercut your competition's ability to make deployments happen.

Obviously Canonical is interested in getting Ubuntu deployed as widely as possible as quickly as possible..even it means shorting its own support services revenue in the process. At some point they start charging those deployments for services, and as long as the services are less expensive than migrating to a different linux venddor..they will win contracts. Bravo.

-jef