*BSD News Article 25186


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From: jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,comp.unix.bsd,comp.windows.x.i386unix,biz.sco.general
Subject: Re: SCO market share
Date: 20 Dec 1993 19:00:59 GMT
Organization: Mount Holyoke College
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <2f4spb$lcq@slab.mtholyoke.edu>
References: <2efuku$4vj@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu> <9312142221.aa02201@fags.stonewall.demon.co.uk> <hastyCI38BF.1on@netcom.com> <9312170856.aa01663@fags.stonewall.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: orixa.mtholyoke.edu

In article <9312170856.aa01663@fags.stonewall.demon.co.uk>,
Nigel Whitfield <nigel@stonewall.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <hastyCI38BF.1on@netcom.com> hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr) writes:
>>We  no longer support that version; better yet we no longer support
>>that product. Or, how about 4 week turn around to just tell you
>>that they receive your problem statement and yes they have given it
>>a lot of thought and will in the future get back to you.
>
>No. No bells rung there, thanks. If I got support like that, I'd tell
>people where to stick it and change to an OS where I could get
>sensible responses.

God damn it, Nigel, you're spewing rhetoric but not responding
to any of the counter-arguments people have been presenting or
answering the questions inevitably raised by your assertions...

o Who is your vendor?  Most of the people reading this group have
  had long years of experience dealing with vendor support, and
  have all experienced no end of frustrations with it.  If your
  claims about instant turn-around are true we'll probably all buy
  from the same guys as you do tomorrow.

o Does your vendor reimburse you for business lost due to downtime?
  You keep implying this by saying that the reason you prefer a 
  commercial OS is because you can't afford to be down for a few hours.
  We're not all publishers, but there are many other business that have
  even higher costs associated with down-time (banks and traders, for
  example.)

> How exactly would this be better if I had source
> code and an unsupported OS?

If you had an unsupported OS things would be worse.  But a free OS isn't
automatically unsupported... in the contrary, you get many levels of 
support, depending on how much you want to pay.  Pay nothing and you 
get some support from the Net, but not enough for many of us who use
systems in production.  But if you pay what you would pay to your vendor
to a third-party contract support company, and you'll get a level of
support that many of us believe to be far supperior to what you'll get
from the typical vendor.  You have said nothing to convince anyone of
the contrary.
-- 
Jurgen Botz, jbotz@mtholyoke.edu | ``Accountability is the price of openness''
South Hadley, MA, USA            | - Daniel Geer