darkonc's Journal: Support and Open Source

... there will still be some 25 year old flunky sitting in his parents basement who would just love to send you patches to the firmware running on your fuel injection microprocessor.

That's more likely to be a description of closed source support, except that he'd be siting in his parent company's basement. The difference with Open source is that it might be (substantially) the same flunky, but with the addition of anybody with enough interest to download a copy of the source code -- most likely people with a good deal of training in the area.

Would you rather get that patch from some 25 year old who couldn't get asigned anyththing better than 'supporting' a piece of 10-year-old dead-end software, or a PhD in real-time systems who just haappens to have the same fuel injector?

Open source doesn't automatically mean good support, but it does mean that nobody can absolutely deny you support. You always have the resources and option to do the support yourself. With closed source, the EULA often seems to make it illegal for you to create your own patches for a program -- if you can even figure out where to patch without source.

When Iceland (I think it was Iceland) offered to pay Microsoft to translate Windows for them, and Microsoft refused the request, all that whole country could do was fume about the snub -- until someone suggested moving to Linux for their standard OS.

Windows for Workgroups (WFW) 3.1 is barely 10 years old now. How much would it take to get MS to do a s simple bugfix for that software? I think you'd have an easier time running end-to-end through Baghdad wearing nothing but a US flag and a 'Bomb Iraq" button.

agree

[freaq]

you say

Open source doesn't automatically mean good support, but it does mean that nobody can absolutely deny you support... With closed source, the EULA often seems to make it illegal for you to create your own patches for a program -- if you can even figure out where to patch without source.

a useful argument. hope i remember this when my school asks us students for feedback (a quarterly exercise arund here). I have learned so many workarounds for windows 2000 that i can barely think about when I'm using them. But my mind_is_ working harder.