lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1997]   [Sep]   [30]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Linux (free s/w) support


On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Darren Reed wrote:

> In some mail I received from Darin Johnson, sie wrote
> [...]
> > Ah, but Sun, and *many* other commercial companies, will NOT
> > necessarily help you. You get NO guarantees. And you most certainly
>
> That's if you don't have a support contract.
>
> [...]
> > With Linux, you know who the authors are, and can email them directly,
> > or contract with any of the hundreds or thousands of developers to fix
> > the problems.
>
> Are you telling me that hundreds, if not thousands of people have contributed
> code to the Linux kernel ? How many of them could fix a problem with (say)
> virtual memory or debug an obscure SMP problem ? The weight of numbers maybe
> comforting, but expertise in any particular part may be limited to a handful
> of people.
>
> > With commercial companies, you have to go through a
> > poorly staffed and poorly trained customer support department, and
> > have no alternative to hire someone else to fix the problems.
>
> Whereas with Linux, you have people doing customer support who have never
> been trained for support roles, probably scoff at it even being suggested
> that they do any sort of training and can even be hostile in response if
> it suits them.
>
> A good example of why _NOT_ to choose Linux (from a support point of view)
> is the lack of any problem tracking such as GNATS (well at least not to my
> knowledge - I asked Alan if there was any database of interesting problems
> reported, to which he said he had no knowledge of which I'm implying means
> a lack of this. There's also an absence of any reference to PR's in email
> on the linux-kernel mailling list...). Even FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD use
> GNATS for tracking problems.
>
> You might have lots of people but there is no sense of co-ordination or
> any sort of organisation of those people for problem resolution and nor
> is there any central management of problems. An example of how this can
> be a problem is if I post a problem and get 10 different patches to fix
> the same thing. Each patch is different because nobody knows what the
> other did and there is no tracking of what anyone is doing/has done -
> unless they happen to cc an email list or others.
>
> Basically, Linux is supported by anarchy. Is that what you want to sell
> to management ?
>

I'm really getting sick of this shit, if you prefer sun over linux, go use
it, get the fuck off this mailing list and stop bothering us.


\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:40    [W:0.714 / U:0.032 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site