> >2 hours is better than an hour and a half?
> >
> >{O,o} (Yes, I know that you were free to do other stuff while "on
> > hold" with SpamAssassin. The numbers just sort of tickled me.)
>
>
> Well, of course, let's assume another 30 minutes for the second level support
> person to finally fix my problem. So it works out to two hours either way,
> but in one way I have to listen to terrible hold music and put up with the
> annoyance of dealing with a first level support person who blindly follows a
> script: "Please click start. Now click Shut down. Now click on restart."
>
> Also, while I know you were just being faecetious, part of what I wanted to
> point out was that when you use SA you have direct access to the developers
> themselves along with a host of users who administer SA in real world
> environments. You'll never NEVER get anything like that from a proprietary
> vendor.
I have an interesting experience about MS: I have been using MS money (no
jokes, please!) for years.
Out of nowhere, I noticed it was reporting "mad" numbers about projected future
budget in one or some of its built-in reports.
Then, I had the wonderful idea to call MS support. I told them all info about
my issue and it took a week or two for them to call me back (or I had to call
them again, don't recall now).
So, I was told only way to try to solve it was sending them my money file (5
years of all my transactions, investments, savings etc etc). NO WAY!!
A few days later - not believing they don't have the answer - I found the
issue/solution I had in their knowledge base.
The point is:
1. I support open source because I believe many the solutions are much more
stable and better in a general way than many, many commercial solutions -
forget about those highly customized appliance using OS code.
2. There was never a problem I had that I wasn't able to solve posting to some
list or searching for it.
3. I completely agree with commercial support that *really* works (does this
exists?). Most of products/solutions - IT only, of course - have a support cost
inside final product price. They charge you for that, but I haven't seen any
good feedback when I needed it.
(From my experience it was about 4-5 calls in my entire life! Never got a
definitive answer for them...I found all answers browsing the web or testing
myself)
Because of answers I got from my post, we have that open source or SA itself is
not visible to the market (MS market...you name it) as a solution to problems.
You need to have it embedded in a "solution for all your spam problems with 0
false positives garanteed" for someone to take it serious.
Unfortunately, I *need* to mention that open source is still in the hands of
technicians (like me and many of you, I am sure ) all around and not really
going into corporate/market *with reliability*.
If they, out there, would take SA and open source as a seriuos, mature, stable
etc solution they MUST SEE it as a real competitor to many appliance and spam
engines available.
Sorry folks, because I am quite fustated that such comparison did never take
place.
Regards.
__________________________________________________________________________
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