On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Darren Spruell wrote: > On 3/16/07, Martin Schrvder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [snip blah blah blah...] > > I want > everyone trying to make that point to think of all the software > vendors they deal with, including the commercial software vendors to > whom you pay thousands (and depending on the size of your > organization, millions) of dollars to per year. Can you say that you > get SMTP notifications from all of them? The answer, if you're in any > situation resembling what I've been in for the last decade, is no.
To focus this even more, I managed some VAX/VMS machines in the 1980's, supporting about a half dozen aero engineers and programmers. The software support contract for VMS ran me around 5-7 thousand USD a year, in the dollars of the day, say $15K/yr in current money, which got us mailed magtapes when there were bug fixes or new versions, and great boxes of paper when the documentation changed. This was not the most extreme level of support available, which would have included a field engineer to come around and patch the systems within 24 hrs or such. This did not include support for such extras as the Fortran, C or Pascal compilers or other "fluff". This did not include the VMS license itself, just the support on it. And, at that time, Digital was considered a responsive, cost-effective solution, and it was. With OpenBSD, I get a system that is at least as robust, much more capable, but with support that fixes bugs before I hear of them. (And I listen.) I get this for almost nothing. Digital actually warranteed their software (unheard of these days, at least in the PeeCee world), i.e. if it didn't work, you'd get it fixed, and quickly. OpenBSD doesn't warrantee anything, but they fix things as fast as Digital used to (24-48 hrs). Did I mention what a VAX/VMS source code license cost? I seem to recall 100K$ being mentioned. I get a kick out of people who are too slack to spend the two hours of reading and twenty minutes of unattended execution time it takes to CVS or patch a kernel and compile it. I would have killed to have the VMS kernel sources. Dave
