[kwlug disc.] "people don't respect what they don't pay for"

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Thursday 20 September 2007 21:20:11 unsolicited wrote:
> Valid technical reasons, which in large part neither joe user nor I.T.
> Manager cares about. Therefore it's just noise. Not that they're not
> valid, I just never seem to be able to convince such so that they
> acquire the same passion as I.

I've got a perfect example of why open source will always have a huge 
advantage over closed-source/proprietary systems.

The laptop I had at work (T60) ran Feisty Fawn without issue.  Everything just 
worked.  My plain-vanilla P4 (Penitum D I guess) machine running the same has 
all manner of strange little gotchas (I'm running a memtest86 tonight when I 
go to bed just to make sure).  One of these weird little things is that 
sometimes, but not always, Flash sites cause Konqueror to hang.  There's no 
rhyme or reason to it.

On a whim, I threw "nspluginviewer hanging locking konqueror" into Google and 
came across https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=294385.  Similar 
issue, and reading through the comments you can *clearly* see how anyone with 
the ability to invoke GDB is helping out.  It's not even my distro, but the 
problem occurs in the same place, and a patch (for a completely different 
distro again) appears here: 
http://people.mandriva.com/~boiko/patches/kdebase-3.5.7-fix_flashplayer_nsplugin.patch

Now, if this was a serious enough problem for me, I have a fix.  I'll bet you 
a donut that you can't get that kind of support from MS, even with a support 
contract.  You can't buy that kind of support from anyone outside of MS, 
because they haven't got the source.  In short, you're stuck with what they 
provide.  Period, full-stop.

Imagine now if this is a security fix, or a well-used feature that was phased 
out in a standard software update.  Let's leave MS out of this for a moment, 
and pick on... oh... AccPac, Adobe, AutoCAD, Kaspersky, OrCAD, Quickbooks, 
RSLogiX, SAP, Symantec... 

Of course, someone will honk mightily on about how you can get custom software 
solutions... and in a way it's true, but the ROI just isn't there for most of 
it, and those who tout their software as extensible and modular are generally 
blowing so much smoke up your ass, as they only provide extensibility through 
VB hooks and even those are limiting.  I'm looking squarely at pretty much 
every single piece of ERP and CRM software out there with that statement.

This discussion's infuriating in a way, because we're all preaching to the 
converted.  We all nod and agree, but we need some people from *outside* this 
circle to read this and provide counter-arguments.  

> Re-educating all your users, particularly your I.T. support staff.

Try changing your drafting department's software from AutoCAD to SolidWorks, 
or vice-versa.  Or your accounting department from AccPac to MYOB or 
BusinessVIsion.  You get the idea; the re-education costs aren't limited to 
closed vs open-source.  People don't like change, period.

> I have called MS, and been satisfied. Never called OSS. I doubt they'd
> be much different - except, if you're a solid MS shop, they get you
> wherever you need to go. Any mixed environment and the finger pointing
> starts.

An all-MS shop still finger-points... It's the hardware, it's the vendor, it's 
the third-party software... 

-A.