Hi! On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 04:29:40PM -0600, Chris 'Xenon' Hanson wrote: >Hannah Schroeter wrote: >>IIRC there're consultants offering commercial services around OpenBSD, >>too. So you could've hired one to fix the Broadcom problem of yours, >>just like you paid for Nortel's on-site troubleshooting.
> Not to inflame the issue, but this isn't as solid of an argument as it > appears. Knowing in advance whether you'll be able to find a consultant who >knows enough about your problem to fix it is very tenuous. Of course you can look out in advance, before you start depending on it, i.e. first look for people who can support things, perhaps make some kind of support contract or pre-contract with them, *then* install your mission critical systems. >[...] > If one could guarantee that the person who wrote the problematic code > were always available as a consultant, the analogy might be closer, but >frequently that's not the case. Even a commercialized open source OS like >Red Hat Linux is going to face this issue. But now, commercial vendors also integrate 3rd party code, and then they might also not have people who wrote the code *themselves* in house. E.g. commercial OSes shipping with OpenSSH. > Then again, OpenBSD is free. No one expects it to be exactly like > commercial software, and it has a lot of benefits that commercial software >won't. Choose the tool that best fits the requirements. Right. Kind regards, Hannah.
