[jim@home.net]
> But, yesterday, I ran into a shining example of one reason that FOSS will
> never work for small business
(...)
> In about an hour, they confirmed that there was a problem
(...)
> Small businesses (which are 90+% of all businesses) are called "small
> businesses" because they are small. This generally means no in-house
> programmers. So, small businesses are at the mercy of the coders that
> provide the software that they run on. In this instance, I am at the
> mercy of these coders.

So goes the argument, that for proprietary software you have paid for
a product, you have someone to blame when things go wrong, and you
have a warrancy. In reality, the warrancy is usually worthless, and
in reality it's more important to fix the problems than to find
someone to blame. It's sometimes possible to find companies offering
paid support or warrancy on free software.

For proprietary software, you are _really_ at the mercy of the company
that made the code. This company may go bankrupt, and then the
software most likely won't be maintained anymore. They may not have
the resources to priority to fix your problem - or maybe you're
representing such an insignificant part of their market that they
don't bother to priority it at all. Have you tried to enter the
forums and offer money for someone to fix the bugs or help you with
your problems? In most cases, this is possible with FOSS, but
impossible with secret-source software.

FOSS developers are different, some do it just for the pride of it,
others have a commercial interesst, yet others may barely be
maintaining some "legacy" software that they don't care much about
anymore. In most cases, when pointing out a reproducable bug in some
open source software product, it is fixed quite fast and completely
for free. Of course, one cannot rely on this - but that applies for
proprietary software as well!

> As nice as they are, this "I'll get to it when I can" attitude is just not
> acceptable to small businesses.

"I'll get to it when I can" is better than "then you're out of
luck"...

--
Tobias Brox, 69°42'N, 18°57'E