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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.misc:4879 comp.os.linux.misc:33528 comp.os.os2.advocacy:74650 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.os2.advocacy Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!newshost.marcam.com!news.kei.com!travelers.mail.cornell.edu!cornell!mdw From: mdw@cs.cornell.edu (Matt Welsh) Subject: Re: Linux thoroughly insulted by Infoworld! Message-ID: <1995Jan19.015527.16465@cs.cornell.edu> Organization: Cornell CS Robotics and Vision Laboratory, Ithaca, NY 14850 References: <950116203411@lambada> <1995Jan18.214037.6088@cs.cornell.edu> <3fk4hi$iu8@solaris.cc.vt.edu> Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 01:55:27 GMT Lines: 41 In article <3fk4hi$iu8@solaris.cc.vt.edu> mmead@goof.com (matthew c. mead) writes: >In article <1995Jan18.214037.6088@cs.cornell.edu>, >Matt Welsh <mdw@cs.cornell.edu> wrote: >>First of all, I feel that this is an inaccurate interpretation of the >>attitude taken in the article. The article was rather sympathetic >>towards Linux, and "underware" was used as a joke. They rank Linux >>below commercial software, primarily because they wouldn't trust it >>for "mission-critical" applications. That's fine, if they want to take >>that attitude. > > Catch a clue. You're in school, you have the time to play around with >it all you want. If you'd ever been in industry, you would know the need for >product support. Can you call Linus and say, "My serial port isn't working >right. What do I do?" No. Can you call up Sun, or BSDI and do the same? >Yes. Mission-critical applications need to have a supported OS. And for >industry, on the net, donated help is not an option. I guess you didn't take the time to read my article before firing off this uninformed flame. First of all, I have been in industry for a number of years, so I know how it works. And there are two ways of looking at it. If something's wrong with Linux, it's usually much easier to "call up" or e-mail the responsible person and either get a fix or hack the source yourself. If you're a big compaNY and one of Sun or BSDI's major customers, maybe you can call them up and get results quickly---but this isn't always the case. The companies that I have worked for have sometimes had this clout, and other times have had no luck in getting problems resolved in a reasonable amount of time. I would argue that the variance in turnaround time for fixing Linux problems is somewhat less. My argument was that your experience will seriously taint your judgement of a system such as Linux. It sounds like you have had favourable experience with commercial operating systems and response from the vendor for resolving problems. My experience has been somewhat mixed, and I'm sure many Linux users would join me in agreeing that major problems and bugs are fixed very, very quickly via e-mail consultation with the developers. I've sent off bug reports and had developers mail me a patch in a matter of hours, and I've also been able to fix problems myself with the source code. Catch a clue, indeed. mdw