Open Source Economics

On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 13:52, der.hans wrote:
> Am 23. Jan, 2004 schwätzte Ed Skinner so:
>
> Enforceable support is almost completely dependent on contract law and
> paying for the support. As you know, Monta Vista will sell you support if
> you pay for Hard Hat. Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake will all gladly sell you
> support. Red Hat might be the only one of those 3 that has embedded support.
>
> There are other companies in that space, but you know it better than I do :).
>
> > rarely works out that way but, nonetheless, the threat is there and, as a
> > consequence, most sellers of commercial software products do a mediocre to
> > good job of post-sales support.)
>
> As you point out here, proprietary support does not mean you'll actually 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
(a very long time ago) and finally getting the answer that the reason
the system would crash when I was installing WinNT SP3 was that when SP3
stopped and asked if I wanted to update the E100B driver, Yes was the
wrong answer. Certain BSOD. After applying SP3 to the existing and then
the new install and going BSOD on reboot, I called Dell and an hour and
a half later or so, they told me that was the problem. More devices to
support now, more bugs in distribution versions of software now, more
software choices (yes, even on Server) and at this stage, I'm lucky to
get a knowledgeable tech support rep on the phone in under 2 days.

Enforceable? Don't make me laugh.

I don't think that when it comes to Desktop computers, Servers, OS -
that proprietary vendors have even the slightest chance of providing the
quality of technical support that you can get from FOSS since the
projects all have mail lists and you can ask the
authors/contributers/other users directly. In those instances where the
FOSS mailing list members might tell you to RTFM, that's when the
proprietary support can generally be helpful. Thankfully, I've been
saved from the vapidity of interminable telephone holds, or in Red Hat's
case, to find out if Sendmail was truly compiled with LDAP support in
under 48 hours from web support...On the second day, I nervously called
Red Hat to get the answer and my tech support guy was great...he said
what? I dunno, I'll have to pass this along to more elevated level
support personnel but it might take another 24 hours. I got the point.

I don't know what the embedded world is like - but in the ball park that
I've been playing in, support from proprietary sources doesn't come
close to support from FOSS projects.

Craig