On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 04:14 -0700, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > > There is more information here: > > > > http://www.cio.com/article/588163/Oracle_Enacts_all_Or > > _Nothing_Hardware_Support_Policy?taxonomyId=3234 > > Presuming it to be accurate, there are a couple of considerations > that approach misses: > > * some of today's home/educational/small business have influence > over tomorrow's enterprise IT budgets. Indeed, some people are > concurrently in both roles, and those are probably among the more > knowledgeable.
No doubt. And they often turn up via contacts that are least expected. Bridges once burned.... > * while there's no profit in committing oneself to support unpaying users, > they're still good for one (other) thing (assuming they have a way to provide > it): > feedback/bug reports. Every time some nobody finds and reports a bug > before a paying customer does, you don't look like an idiot in front of the > folks that pay the bills. Smart companies do not define "profitable" _solely_ in terms of dollars. Not everything can be quantified, e.g. the value of the goodwill you create. Or don't. Sun was on the path to building credible goodwill in the Open Source world these past few years. Oracle, in less than two months has destroyed it. The real impetus behind this is pure arrogance. Nobody w/o a few million in their pocket matters to Larry. But then he's also building up one heck of a karmic debt and sooner or later the universe will collect. Not that that provides much consolation for the abused. -- Ken Gunderson <kgund...@teamcool.net> _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
