> Nothing is perfect. You can't expect anything free > or commercial to be > perfect. But if you have a support contract and > something goes wrong, you > can demand that they address your issue. Unlike a > free product ... If > something goes wrong, you have to dig into it > yourself, and if you manage to > find the cause of the problem, you can't demand > anybody to fix it for you. > You just hope they will, when and if they feel like > it. > > That's the point of a commercial support contract. > > To be supported is the opposite of being free. > They're mutually exclusive.
No, they're not. To be guaranteed a minimal level of support (which may not necessarily provide resolution of any particular problem) is not free. However, as long as a free project remains active, free interaction which often produces just as good or better results, and often faster, may be available, although it will require more knowledgable participation (which even with contract support, can speed results considerably). And many free projects have enough interest that commercial support is also available for them, offering the option of whatever guarantee that provides. Also, some places that are naturally rather technical may well do just fine with in-house support for many of their systems. Commercial support, and either a commercial product or one with a very well established commercial commitment to its maintenance, is appropriate for more demanding production environments, but may be an unjustified expense for other than critical functions or midsize to large businesses. Any attempt to say that only a commercial product, or only commercial support, is suited for certain uses, grossly oversimplifies the situation. As such, as long as the redistributable closed binaries are being updated, or once they've been replaced, it's just a question of sufficient interest and effort on the part of a relatively small number of people as to whether there's an active distro, so long as the code base is being maintained, but without necessarily needing additional commercial support to maintain the distro. I'm not recommending panicking in that direction! Save for assurance against unexplained delays such as presently happening, it seems to me a duplication of effort. But the option exists. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
