After you tip your hand...

After you tip your hand...

Posted Nov 20, 2003 16:15 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462)
In reply to: After you tip your hand... by lacostej
Parent article: Thomas Bushnell is no longer Hurd maintainer

You seem to be making the same mistakes as the original poster.

Community support is a bonus, it is not a replacement for the kind of support you have probably grown accustomed to with respect to proprietary software (you know, the kind that compares memory to gasoline). It is certainly not a right. The mere fact that I choose to distribute my software under a GPL license does not imply that you are entitled to any kind of support from me or anyone else.

If support matters to you, you choose software that is supported. For some shops, this means uncle Ernie will have to be consulted, other companies will be turning to IBM, RedHat or one of the many other companies that sell support as a product. Your suggestion that free software and signed agreements do not play nicely together strikes me as odd. Plus, with free software you have the possibility to take matters into your own hands, something that is much harder -- if not impossible -- to do with prorietary software.

In other words, the whole spectrum of support is available to you, at least in principle.

(By the way, the popularity of some Google groups and other forums should tell you something about your average level of support for proprietary software.)

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