On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 09:10:32 -0700, Don Calfa <
tvat3000@ponymail.us> wrote:
> You sell $30,000 of server equipment to the CDC, General Dynamics,
> Honeywell, Motorola, etc... they're going to want vendor support. $1000
> and unlimited user licenses beats the pants off $795 + $200 per user AND
> that comes with phone support. $1000 is chump change for the cost of
> business.
...compared to time-cost and payroll for using a totally gratis system.
RH and Suse have people who concentrate on making sure their paying
customers are happy. Installations and jobs that are common to all their
users get taken care of, both in terms of the technical factor and people
on the phone, chat, and web that know how to instruct. This saves
thousands of companies the trouble of re-solving the problems. $1000 is
chump change compared to three or four people working on a problem for two
weeks. This also decreases the response time when common problems appear
in their customer base. Companies don't necessarily contribute to the OS
community, but when they call and complain to Suse, the Suse people note
the complaint and get FAQs or patch up quick.
Debian people will respond to complaints "add the line
'ModuleRecomplunktVimblight=32.59 to /etc/hoopskirt/revb.conf, what are
you a n00b?"... in their heads, while completely ignoring the whiner in
the chatrooms. Even if that line is something absolutely everyone has to
add, it's very likely it will never be included in distributions or in
HOWTOs. (Usually because "it's just too obvious".) The OSFS model seems
to support a system where such problems do get solved and recycled by the
community, but there are too many practical cases where it doesn't for
all-gratis-libre OSFS.
--
--Alexander
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