RE: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms

[Jonathan Peterson]

> Agreed entirely. I was thinking purely of hardware support; software
> support IME is always and everywhere a complete waste of time
> and money.

I have encountered good software support with applications that:
a) Cost over 20 grand
and/or
b) Are not widely used

I think there are lots of companies that make stuff like ultrasound imaging
software for examining stress patterns in heavy machinery (or whatever),
where the company has maybe sold 100 copies of the software across the whole
world for 250k a pop. This software often has very good support. It's a
whole world away from the mass software market we have to deal with.

I've encountered good support for Veritas' Netbackup package, but again we
were paying about 6k / annum for the support contract.


> And then people wonder why I like open source...

Even within OS software there's good support and bad support. There's plenty
of OS software that _doesn't_ have helpful user groups, and has very poor
documentation and so on.