Oren!
I think we can all safely say that software support is virtually NON EXISTANT
where closed source software for the masses is concerned.
Did you ever see a commercial company release a a bug fix just for you ? Did
you ever manage to get in contact with ANYONE in MS who knows what the ?%$%
they are talking about (meaning someone who actually saw the code and knows
how it works) ? No. Software support is a myth devised by companies to better
sell their string of bits which has 0$ duplication cost. I don't blame them.
Software makes for tough sell so they try to sell the support. In the Open
Source case software support is a much more viable solution since you can
actually DO something about a problem without forcing RedHat to release a
full bug fix version because a problem that is bugging you but is a non
problem in the eyes of RedHat. This is indeed a viable business and such
companies do exist. Sometimes the distributions do it themselves and
sometimes it's small Linux consulting companies who know the system better
than you and can actually fix the userspace and kernel code for you.
About hardware support: did you ever get a visit from NVIDIA, Creative, IBM
hard disk devision or other people to check what went wrong with your
hardware ?!? Enough said. The hardware market is built on: build it, write a
device driver, test test test and ship it out. No support is included unless
the thing is totally broken in which case you could probably return it. I
don't see why it would be any different on Linux except the device driver
code would be open source in most cases.
From the hardware perspective the only difference is that releasing a driver
for linux is still not a standard (I would still prefer an open source driver
when I can get one because they are written better). In any case you can hire
a kernel hacker to write a device driver for just about anything these days,
or, if you have enough weight, try to convince the hardware manufacturor to
write one.
Cheers,
Mark
--
Name: Mark Veltzer
Title: Research and Development, Meta Ltd.
Address: Habikaa 17/3, Kiriat-Sharet, Holon, Gush-Dan, Israel 58495
Phone: +972-03-5508163
Fax: +972-03-5508163
Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://www.veltzer.org
OpenSource: CPAN, user: VELTZER, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], url:
http://search.cpan.org/author/VELTZER/
Public key: http://www.veltzer.org/ascx/public_key.asc, wwwkeys.pgp.net,
0xC71E5D38
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