On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Madel, Kurt wrote: > I believe that support for Debian is very important and is something that > should be investigated. However, I believe that it may be difficult to > combat an over-commercialized distribution if you start pushing for > professional 24X7 commercial support. The kind of support that corporate > business requires is of the commercial variety.
Actually, "corporate business" has resources in place to do INTERNAL support. The sort of telephone "camp on hold" support lines that have become what people think of as technical support are something that "corporate business" can do without if their internal support personnel have the tools they need to do their jobs without it. I believe that the so-called information revolution is going through its third phase. The first phase was when computers were large, rare, and expensive. The second phase started with the rise of the microcomputer and the introduction of the ISV. The third phase started with the rise of the Internet and the introduction of freeware of "commercial" quality and a substantial feature set. People keep talking about how Linux, and other freeware, are "unsupported" like what they get from Microsoft can be characterized as "support." However, I view poor support as a problem of the second phase and as soon as we can escape second-phase thinking (such as "I've got to have a toll-free telephone number that I can call to harass the vendor") the issue of "support" will simply disappear. After all, who needs support when you (or your hired expert) has the source? -- Jonathan Guthrie ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Brokersys +281-895-8101 http://www.brokersys.com/ 12703 Veterans Memorial #106, Houston, TX 77014, USA