On Monday 14 July 2003 05:00 pm, Derek Neighbors wrote:
> > 6. If there's a bug in free software, you can either fix it yourself, or
> > hire
> > any programmer on the market to fix it. You don't have to beg MegaCorp
> > to please, pretty please, fix that bug, please?! (And the bug doesn't
> > get fixed for years, if ever).
>
> This goes back to removing the "MegaCorp" references. :) Even though they
> are true.
Note that MegaCorp, in the above example (which is mine), was not Microsoft.
It was an OS vendor, but not Microsoft, though Microsoft was an investor in
the company. (That should narrow it down a little :-). I suffered through
three miserable years of working around bugs in their OS. Not a single one
of them were ever fixed through three years of begging. They drove me to
Linux, quite literally -- I swore up and down that I was never going to place
myself and my employer at the mercy of a "We don't care, we don't have to
care, because we already have your money" vendor again. On Red Hat Linux,
Red Hat refused to fix some bugs in the printer daemon. I shrugged, fixed
them myself, and that was that. For *THREE YEARS* I suffered with a buggy
printer daemon under MegaCorp's product (the entire print system locked up if
a secretary turned off a printer, then someone else tried to print to it, and
the only way to unlock it was a full reboot!).
As for Microsoft, they actually have a reasonable record on bug fixes, at
least on bugs that are fixable (some of the "bugs" are actually architectural
artifacts, unfixable without breaking backward compatibility, which Microsoft
is also fairly good about). Some of the 3rd party hardware vendors aren't as
good about bugs in their drivers, but that can be avoided easily enough.
As for my example of MegaCorp and licensing fees, again, that was not
Microsoft that was the culprit there. It was a Major Database Engine Vendor
that shall not be named. We'd based our product upon an embedded version of
their database engine, then once they had buy-in, they hiked their fees on
us. At least they tried to -- the proposed hike in the license fees would
have put us out of business. After we threw lawyers at them for a while
(claiming they were going to destroy a multi-million dollar investment, we
were going to sue them for millions, etc. etc. etc.), they settled back down
to something reasonable. But the point is that if we'd used an Open Source
embedded database engine, that would not have happened. That's why every
project of mine since then has had an Open Source embedded database engine,
not a proprietary one.
Since I do not usually follow Microsoft and its deeds, I find it interesting
that you believed Microsoft was the culprit in both of these examples. Pretty
much anybody who has been in a real IT environment will be nodding their
heads and saying "Yeah, that happened to me." Vendors are often very
aggressive about license fee hikes once they have you in lock-in, and often
very laggardly about bug fixes, since bug fixes don't make them money and
they already have your money.
--
Eric Lee Green
mailto:eric@badtux.org
Unix/Linux/Storage Software Engineer needs job --
see
http://badtux.org for resume
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