Richard L. Hamilton writes:
> You sound like you're looking for something resembling support for
> a commercial product, without having to pay for a support contract.

Indeed.

> Having said that, perhaps it would be good to have a way for anyone to
> _report_ bugs, but with no assurance of any acknowledgement.  A very

You can in fact already do that.  Just file those bugs through
bugs.opensolaris.org.  Yes, that's supposed to be for OpenSolaris, and
I think the community in general really doesn't want opensolaris.org
turned into a dumping ground for Sun's customer support, but the truth
is that the submissions through that site go through a triage process
where internal developers volunteer to recategorize as appropriate.

We're not evil, so when S10 bug reports come in that way (and it does
happen with some frequency today), we recategorize them as
appropriate.

However, that said, it's a scattershot approach to "support."  The
main problem I see is that unless you're in touch with support, it's
unlikely that there are many developers who will donate time to the
rather expensive and difficult process of finding the problem,
devising a solution, performing required testing, and then creating an
S10 patch.  It's easily ten times harder than fixing something in
OpenSolaris.  So, if you were reporting the bug with the hope of
getting a cheap fix, I doubt it'll work often.  (Though it may well
work "sometimes.")

A secondary (and almost equally important) problem is that a
substantial fraction of the bugs that go through that site are
technically weak -- they either lack a complete problem description,
or describe something that isn't a problem, or are just so vague that
little can be done about them.  Getting down to a valid and usable
problem report is something that Sun's technical support is supposed
to deal with, and without that filter in place, quite a few of the
reports just go nowhere at all.

But if none of that sways you towards using Sun's technical support
services with Sun's commercial Solaris 10 product, then I suppose it's
fair to ask for problem reports submitted however you're willing to
give them.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677
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