"Tobias Brox" <tobias@stud.cs.uit.no> wrote in message
news:g2q60g$15lc$1@news.uit.no...
> [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.

We agree completely on that point.

> 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.

I offered money and free beer (as in free beer) to the maintainers of the
code base. They were not interested.

> 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!

At least with proprietary code-based busineses you have a barganing chip -
your business. They fix it or lose you as a stream of revenue. With FOSS,
you don't even have that.

>> 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"...

They bot have the same impact on my current project.

jim