"jim" <jim@home.net> wrote in message
news:xn24k.3147$3F5.3058@bignews2.bellsouth.net...
>
> "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.
>


If you have a working system using another product it is seldom worth the
effort of changing it.
If you are google and want thousands of machines and you can employ
engineers then its fine to switch to OSS if there is a business case.
You haven't done a business case or you would stick with what's already
working.
No small business will save enough to make a switch worthwhile whether its
between windows xp to vista or windows to mac or to linux for a working
system. The costs savings on the software just aren't enough. You need
another reason to do it. Like increased functionality, some "odd" hardware,
etc.

Go and do a business case and if it still says linux then pay someone to fix
it.
Don't say linux can't support business because it can't for *you*.