Looking inwards on the Long Tail

I talked about the Long Tail of FOSS deployments. What also gets added on as metadata is the context of support. A significant percentage of the Long Tail deployments is fulfilled by small vendors. These are not the grey market assemblers, but the smaller branded assemblers who custom create the PC configuration based on what can provide maximum push to the bottomline. These smaller vendors have a good amount of interaction with institutes and businesses within their local area eg. colleges and universities who want to purchase small numbers of desktops/workstations, SOHO setups etc. Sometimes they also provide services viz setting up webservers or print servers etc. These agencies form a niche audience for distribution of pre-loaded Linux boxes and support on services. Thus, what has long been the bottleneck – having the depth of support teams to provide desktop support to deployments might be taken care of.

The next step of course is creating recipes for deployment. This would enable the standardised builds to be rolled out and which would also take the headache of supporting a myriad number of base systems off the support teams. Of course this also means that a small number of folks could do consulting on all these domains. Looked at in isolation these don’t seem like lucrative revenue streams, however looked at in the perspective of numbers – they are nice enough to get involved.These are but bits of the steps that need to be taken to ensure that we overcome the challenges that hinder FOSS from being popular. These include:

    • providing a complete experience for the home user
    • providing services and solutions for the SOHO units
    • reaching out to the maximum possible number of users through locally present vendors
    • creating FOSS skillsets and awareness where none exists

    However, these are all examples of consuming FOSS. Contribution to FOSS is the next stage of evolution