I wouldn't be surprised if ZA got just as much inquiries about problems with VNC as they would for a commercial product. The fact that they have a scripted response (and a question in the FAQ) about VNC specifically testifies to that. But maybe they don't have an entity to contact that is responsible for VNC. My understanding is that AT&T created VNC for its own purposes, and makes it available to the public out of good will (I have never seen this degree of charity before, and am curious about a business model that makes this OK). Makes one all the more appreciative of the software.
In the case of TightVNC, there is a lone author, and I don't know if they would like to bug someone when even in mailing lists, it seems preferrable to try the mailing list first for fear of inundating the single person with all sorts of email. Also, there seem to be a plethora of versions of VNC, which exacerbates the fact that there is no steward...or rather, it is a personal endeavour of any "keeper" rather than a business obligation -- as you say. Finally, VNC is not as big as, say, browsers. The info that is already available from ZA is an acknowledgement of VNC's prevalence, although the problem still needs more investigation. Microsoft does not worry about making Word compatible with Framemaker, though there is some attempt at the reverse by Adobe. Not that ZA is as big as microsoft, but I expect a business has more incentive to cater to an outside product with a large (or larger) user base--again, as you suggest. And finally finally, I'm using the free version of ZA. Maybe we can hear from the paying customers to see if support is greater. Fred -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred Ma Department of Electronics Carleton University, Mackenzie Building 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1S 5B6 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ========================================================================== > Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 15:38:49 -0500 > From: "Alex Angelopoulos" > Subject: Re: Win 98/95 setup - slow access > > I hate to politicize things, but re the ZoneAlarm stuff there's > something I've been thinking of. Products which are not commercial > (such as VNC) tend to be neglected by any software OEMs I think, > possibly due to the fact that there isn't another corporate entity which > will say nasty things on it's website about compatibility issues. A less > paranoid reason is that in the absence of a unified point where problems > with a particular application are raised, it's easy for overworked > developers to discount issues as being to user misconfiguration. > > On the other hand, a strength of open source applications such as VNC is > they usually have a large, active base of technically literate users who > communicate with each other. In a case such as this, if an OEM gets a > sudden bunch of emails from many people all pointing to issues with a > particualr application, citing the circumstances under which the problem > occurs, it sticks out in the problems list like a sore thumb. It is > simply not easy to ignore 15 emails from 15 people in a two day period > saying there may be a problem. > > Just a thought; it's a useful lobbying tactic to get something done. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the line: 'unsubscribe vnc-list' in the message BODY See also: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/intouch.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------
