I guess I wasn't clear in my original post - I used the title "pragmatic" intentionally.
I'm not disputing that there are bugs, I'm also not disputing that all of us paid for the software assuming it would not have bugs, and I'm not disputing that it would be nice to get the bugs fixed without having to buy an upgrade. What I am stating, I believe, is the reality in the software world that no software is 100% bug free, no software vendor will continue to maintain a specific version level indefinitely and keep releasing fixes to it, and no software vendor can be forced to release bug fixes for free or without a maintenance contract. Yes, it would be great if all software was bug free, and it would be really nice if software vendors would keep maintaining software for ever and back-merging fixes into older versions, but this is not realistic. I do not feel that Ipswitch, or most other vendors, intentionally release buggy software or mis-represent what they are providing. It is simply a reality in the software industry that products have bugs and at some point the code is "forked" into a new features release and bug fixes will only be rolled forward, not backward. I don't work for Ipswitch and I'm not sticking up for them, but I do think it is unfair to expect them to act differently than their competitors both small and large, yet be able to remain in business. Hell, I'd be happy if some of our other software suppliers were even half as good as Ipswitch. I recently got BANNED from the Lyris vendor mailing list for the "criminal offense" of asking the list why their new software uses the obscure/geeky TCL/TCK script language instead of mainstream stuff like ASP, Perl, or PHP. wow! great way to get customer feedback -- ban them for openly giving their opinion. >The fact is that we pay for a product that has bugs. Some of the >bugs are fixed, but others remain. Then we are told that they have >new major >release and we now we have to pay again to get the bugs >from the prior version >fixed. That, my friend, is what is known in >common nonclemature as a bait and >switch. It's a crooked business >practice, no matter how you try to justify it. I >will not pay for >another release of IMail and if our current version no longer does >>the job, I will look elsewhere. Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
