On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 12:28 AM, Matthew Barr <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Actually, it's not. I don't want to hack at code. I want to get my job > done. It may be a question of what under the covers is, but I'm not really > wanting to fight the products that I've bought. I think this is spot on and goes way beyond MSFT vs. *NIX. For different companies and individuals, the amount of fighting they will put up with will vary depending on the ROI vs. invested capital/time/effort. Companies seem to be less willing to spend resources (employee time which translates into money, etc) debugging products that they've paid for and have expensive support contracts than they are willing to with, for instance, open source solutions that come with no strings attached (but require their staff to go "under the hood" more frequently). My team and I were mostly hired to work on open source solutions and make the most out of it. When it breaks or is not satisfying, we do all and everything we can so it meets the business needs. But we also have to manage some black boxes with expensive support contracts. When they break, we use all our knowledge to quickly restore the _service_ but don't waste too much time going under the hood to fix a bug. We wouldn't even be allowed to by the vendor (even though we know it's open source down there too). If our open source solution is having kernel panics, I'll get the kernel dump and analyse it all the way until I find what's going on and either fix it or work around it. If our black box solution is panic'ing, I'll generate the kernel dump and open a support request. End of history. Meanwhile I'll be working hard to restore the _service_ and, lucky for us, the knowledge is interchangeable. -- Giovanni Tirloni ([email protected])
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