An example of this, btw, is SSH. We've purchased a copy of SSH2 for
Windows to log into remote customer sites with. Unfortunately, it
crashes from time to time (thank goodness for screen). When it crashes,
I can pull up a dissassembled view of its current state in Visual
Studio, but that's pretty worthless to me, and the tech support people
have told me that its my computer's fault on about 6 occasions now. (If
anyone important and SSH is listening, feel free to do something). That
said, using OpenSSH on our servers has been wonderful because I've been
able to patch it up to do things it wasn't meant to do originally as
well as debug some bugs as I've gone along with the trusty source code.
Not every sysadmin's a programmer, mind you. Its a shame :-).
Bill Royds wrote:
> Most closed source products have an End User License Agreement (EULA)
> that denies any liability, so there is no advantage to buying any
> Microsoft based product in that respect. The only value is buying a
> support contract from the manufacturer of software or a separate
> supporting firm.But that is also available for most open source
> software so that doesn't really distinguish them. As a matter of
> fact, the open source support tends to be better because the support
> personnel can look at source themselves rather than waiting for the
> development staff to investigate a problem. The liability then can be
> easily assumed by the support company. They do not have to trust
> another third party to fix the bugs.
--
Michael T. Babcock, C.T.O. FibreSpeed
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock
-
[To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe firewalls" in the body of the message.]
