Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 20:32:13 -0600 From: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM> To: cat@ghost.uunet.ca Cc: current@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Advice/Recommendation needed Message-ID: <199604020232.UAA09715@compound>
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Free OS's are a wonderful thing ...but they don't offer a place for the buck to stop. Ah but they do: It stops with you. If you want to pay someone else to take the buck, that's your gig, but I'd take care to get your money's worth, because I don't know of any commercial OS that actually gets supported in small installations. If you don't have a 7 digit contract in the future, my experience has been that a source license is worth something, but a support contract is not. Hardware is another matter. Hardware support contracts are generally worth the money. Software is a joke, because they can't fix it in time for the fix to matter, because they have a whole dev cycle of latency between your problem and your solution. You get the source and you fix it yourself. Same as FreeBSD, same as Linux, same as IRIX or Solaris or SVR4. Besides which, commercial/freeware is irrelevant to specifying the solution to a fixed and well-specified problem. If the software works, it works, now and forever. Change the problem and the range of software solutions appropriate to the problem may change. That's when you will find that you need the source. I'd find some humor in seeing you sue IBM for a bug in AIX. Unless you have a contract that specifies that the bug in question does not exist or will be remedied within some specified trimeframe. And like I said, you're not going to get such a contract without some seriously deep pockets. Frankly, I think your reasoning is erroneous. Your conclusion may be correct -- I don't have any insight into the nature of your problem upon which to base any speculation -- but not the stated justifications.
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