Niall O Broin said:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 09:26:27PM +0100, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
>> > You can always submit bug reports, no matter the vendor.
>> Submit away, but you do not have a way of having the problems fixed, esp.
> not on your schedule. For some bizarre reason, you want to equip your Ford
> Kia with a CD player and the manufacturer hasn't seen fit to provide one.
> You complain, and he says that that's coming in next years model, and you
> can upgrade. You say that you want it today, and you're willing to pay, and
> Ford says "No can do". So you take your car to Joe's Auto Audio where Joe is
> able to fit you a CD player because he can open your bonnet and get access
> to the electricity which the CD player needs and which is thankfully
> supplied in a non proprietary format.
Yep. Aidan, have you ever submitted a bug report to Microsoft? If you
ever got anything that indicated they acked it was a bug, and they were
going to fix it due to your bug report (rather than a bug report from one
of their Fortune 500 clients who get their own personal MS engineer to
look at these things!), then I'll gladly buy you a pint.
One of the main practical (ie. not ideological) reasons *I* use free
software, is that the small company I work for is *never* going to get
anything like service out of any of the big vendors. It takes megabucks
to get a support contract that'll do that, and only other big co's can
afford it.
It's much more affordable to use free software and *fix* it if it doesn't
work.
BTW having said that, there are *small* software companies out there that
will provide good support. But often, as they get bigger, your support
requests will gradually disappear below the radar, replaced by their big
customers.
The trick with proprietary software is often spotting the good, small
companies, and hoping they balance somewhere between going bust, getting
bought out by Rational, or getting big. Once one of those 3 things
happen, you're screwed support-wise. ;)
--j.
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