This a troll?
ken keanon wrote:
Let's consider one aspect of software, i.e. technical support.In the 'free' software world, this of course is done freely.
Unless you purchase a support contact. See Red Hat Enterprise.
In the 'commercial' world, I know of an online technical support, that provided by HP Computers but is free for all as long as it is related to HP computer products. I have seen how it works. When a question is posed, the response is quick and the person answering the query has a human face.
Conversely there's the Microsoft method. No direct support at all unless it is paid for and even then it is often useless.
Which do you think is a better system?
The open method because I have gotten far more correct answers than from the commercial side of things. To date I can't think of a major issue I've that has *EVER* been answered in a commercial setting. Any commercial problem I've needed a response on has been answered correctly by an unpaid, free, for the love of the product person well after the commercial avenues were exhausted.
Let's swing to the higher end of the spectrum, that of innovation. One thing that can be safely said about the 'free' software world is that it has not led in innovation. OS? There was UNIX before Linux. Firefox? Apache? Openoffice? All these have commecially innovated counteparts that existed before them. Why?
And yet why are the open products, time and again, gaining ground on the closes products? You're thinking of innovation on the macro scale. IE, "Oh, there was a commercial web server before apache". You're ignoring the plethora of innovation that happens at a micro scale. For example what features, /real/ features have been made by some programmer out there scratching an itch?
That's why people are going to Linux. And why Apache is the most popular web server. And why the three Ps (Perl, Python, PHP) often are seen as frequently, if not more so than the comparable commercial offerings (ASP, Coldfusion).
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