On 7/25/07, Dave Crozier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Don't you think that the "warm comforting feeling" is because the product is > backed by a big company as opposed to "individuals" no matter how good or > talented they are?
Try to get a big corporation to feel your pain. Ask them to come in on a weekend to help you fix a problem. Some do, most don't, 24x7 support is expensive. Tease someone on this forum with a troubling problem in a technology he knows well. He'll give you hours of time trying to fix it. gratis. To be fair, individuals develop an application and leave it. Others may support it, or no one. How much support is available is one the tickmarks you check when evaluating an application, and sometimes that wil change for individuals as well as for corporation (witness Lotus Approach). A counter-example: I installed Brute Force Detector on a server, as I needed to run ftp on the standard port, and wanted to block skript kiddies. It didn't have a module for my particular brand of ftp server, so I read the source code, asked some questions of folks more knowledgeable than me about Perl, and got it working on my server. In the entire time, I never got a response from the original author. Perhaps he's not interested, moved on, or has a new email address. It was okay. The community could provide the support, because we had the source. > The managerial mentality of thinking is usually that "big" means "safe" as > in "nobody ever got sacked by buying IBM", which, even though we as > developers see the bigger picture seems to be indelibly stamped on the small > brains of the PHB's. Its our job to educate such people. Folks do get fired for picking Big Blue (or Big Red or the Evil Empire). And successful companies are those that can take advantage of the multipliers of Open Source and not get nickeled and dimed to death by commercial companies selling second-rate solutions. > As you say, you have never needed support from Lotus/IBM and I guess that if > you HAD wanted it, it would have been charged for at a large premium and > probably been useless anyway. We all know that the best support comes from > other developers e.g this group for example. Actually, a buddy of mine was fairly high in the Lotus support organization, a former FoxPro guy, and good at what he did. When you get down to the individual level, corporate support can be just as good as Open Source support. Witness the many great support people we've had on the Fox team over the years. The problems come when they are bound by their corporation to no longer support an "obsolete" product or to only offer support M-F 9-5 or for $195 a call. > Unfortunately, my take on the situation is that even if say VFP were made > open source, that the large institutions still wouldn't accept it as a > mainstream product without the support of a major player. Who has more desktops: the 500 Fortune 500 or the two million small businesses with less than 50 people? Who do you write applications for? Where are the interesting applications created? I would much rather work for some small agile company doing insanely cool stuff in Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, XML, CSS3 and XHTML than work for some big behemoth in COBOL. It used to be that new technologies appeared in the F500, costing millions of dollars, and slowly trickled down to where small businesses and hobbiests could afford them. Color monitors, increased memory and hard disk space, 100 Meg ethernet, etc. That was hardware, with high entrance costs. I wonder now that a lot of innovation (really innovation, not marketing slang) is occurring in software and clusters of small inexpensive machines, if that dynamic is reversing. > Stupid I know and I do hope this short sighted attitude changes but I doubt > it will. Industries go through phases of evolution and revolution. Those who fail to catch on to the new way of doing business help supply clients to the rest of us. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
