Zaire still won't connect

[Yu Meng Chong]

Joel Hammer wrote:

>Don't linux advocates
>get worried ?
>
>Bill Gates must sleep well at night.
>
>Joel
>  
>
I will admit that Open Source is not as user-friendly as more commercial 
efforts, and lately, in the rush to "catch-up", I find that more and 
more Open Source software that is released is buggy or requires 
considerable effort to get it to work as advertised (which is why I'm 
actually considering downgrading from Red Hat 9 to TurboLinux 8, and 
from KDE3 to xfce). I think that, for people living in more prosperous 
countries or more prosperous circumstances, there really isn't much that 
OSS can offer. But for some people in Asia, OSS is the most responsible 
way to go.

Consider this scenario :

You live on an island somewhere in the Pacific, or a small town in a 
Third World country, and you're working on an IT project, possibly 
building the first ISP there, or trying to wire up a small branch office 
for a larger company. You install some commercial software that should 
help you get a job done, for example, a RADIUS server or maybe a 
database. You hit problems either with performance or even at the 
installation stage. What do you do ? If you call for support from the 
USA, you'll normally be on wait list, and you'll definitely miss your 
deadline or become an embarrassment to colleagues and management. You 
can try contacting the local support, which you would be *very lucky* if 
he half understands your problem. The local office will probably also 
tell you that the reason why you're not getting a response is because 
your region contributes less than 1% to the revenue hence your request 
is very low priority.

I have seen this happen to me every year of my 10 years in this 
business. The *only time* I have seen prompt response from the vendor is 
when you are willing to pay to fly a consultant in to fix a problem with 
the software -- which should be working in the first place.

Open Source gives you 2 options :

1. If you have some programming background you can dig around in the 
code, and try to fix it yourself

2. You can post your question to a mailing list that actually cares 
about your problems, and maybe get a fix, or at least share the pain.

With commercial software, all you can do, if you have no budget and no 
time, is to sit with "your ass hanging in the breeze" (pardon my 
French), and wait for the axe to fall. Not a very attractive proposition 
if you do have programming skills and can fix the problem yourself.

Which is not to say that your concerns are not valid. If I have an 
opportunity to work in the US, and can make enough to actually buy a 
Palm (and a house and a car and plan for my retirement), I would 
probably say goodbye to Open Source as well. If I can get vendors to 
respond to my problems in a quick and timely manner, I would gladly pay 
money for commercial software.

Regards,
pascal chong