Am 23. Jan, 2004 schw=E4tzte Craig White so:

> On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 13:52, der.hans wrote:
> > Am 23. Jan, 2004 schw=C3=A4tzte Ed Skinner so:

> > > rarely works out that way but, nonetheless, the threat is there and, =
as a
> > > consequence, most sellers of commercial software products do a medioc=
re to
> > > good job of post-sales support.)
> >
> > As you point out here, proprietary support does not mean you'll actuall=
y get
> > resolution...
> ---
> It is REALLY REALLY hard to get quality support on technical products
> and will continue to worsen as it has the past decade. The problem is
> simply that the software world is moving at a frenetic pace and those in
> the know are actively employed in working through the solutions or
> writing the software. I do remember calling Dell one Saturday afternoon

Well, I meant you might not get any resolution at all. Whether or not they
can get qualified help desk people is another question :).

At one job we were using Veriloss NetBackup and having problems with it
recognizing tapes after the backups. Veriloss wouldn't even admit to there
being a bug.

BTW, not only was the data on the tape, but I manually extracted it via dd
and some pipes the one time we absolutely had to have data off one of the
'bad' tapes.

At the time I left the company we'd been complaining to Veriloss for over a
year with no resolution. BTW, the company I was working at was Motorola, so
it wasn't like we weren't paying several times my salary for product and
service.

I can give many more examples. I can, unfortunately, even give examples fro=
m
when I was the person on the phone and couldn't get fixes from engineering.
I'm certain most people here can give examples of total lack of problem
resolution from proprietary vendors.

I'm certain we can all also give examples of bad service from Free Software
projects. The key is that you can turn elsewhere for Free Software.

For the Veriloss case at Mot we could have and would have fixed the problem
if we'd had source code. After rolling 6 or 7 digits to a business critical
backup solution management would've let me have a software engineer for a
couple of weeks to make sure we also had the even more business critical
restoral solution :).

Oh, BTW, the group that absolutely needed data restored that one time wante=
d
my head for taking so long to do the restoral. If we hadn't gotten the data
back I'd've been on very shaky political footing even though I wasn't the
one doing backups and restorals at the time. I'd gotten pulled in because
the situation was over the head of the person doing backups and restorals.
Having my job seriously threatened because a vendor wouldn't provide suppor=
t
really pissed me off. If they'd've at least acknowledged it was a bug, I
would've been able to point fingers to deflate that particular instance.

Oh, and the reason I was able to get the data was because NetBackup uses ta=
r
for its format and I was able to get enough info to figure out how to read
the data back off the tape. In other words, Free Software and Open Standard=
s
saved me when commercially supported proprietary software failed :).

ciao,

der.hans
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