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.Don't linux advocates get worried ?
Bill Gates must sleep well at night.
Joel
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
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