sejo's rants

In one of the last blog entries I made I talked about the concept "support" in Open Source and the reason why there isn't really a market for it. In the end I promised I would talk about my view on the legal part of it.

I did have discussions about support and maintenance, in my opinion maintenance is what you need for the daily operating of the product (product stops working because network issue, disk full, someone removed a critical file etc), support is what you need when all else fails when you have figured out that it is actually the product!

However let me be 100% clear this blog is my opinion, I'm not a lawyer I'm just an Open Source user. The reasoning that follows was formed by experiences in the Belgian and Luxembourg(ian?) IT landscape.

So what is my take on it? First let me share an experience: At one of the companies I worked all the operating systems were bought with official Support even the OS ones, at a certain point of time we came across a problem strictly related to operating system X. We had a 500 licenses of the highest support licenses for that operating system. When trying to get support and getting the problem fixed we were continuously running into walls or got standard answers that the problem did not lie with them. We however could disable the error by recompiling the kernel without 1 of the patches they made to a file system. Eventually it got fixed, by a new major release of X, more than a year later.

We could however take legal action but that would probably have lasted until the major version was out... So the support we payed was worth nothing in the end!

What I want to show with this experience is that legal reason for wanting support is a meager reason. How many companies do you know that have actually started a legal action for support reasons? Even in the closed source world that does not happen that much. Each time I found it might be an option the companies all responded with: "It's not worth the effort".

There is another reason why I think that legal options should not be a reasoning for not choosing Open Source solutions. This is for me the biggest reason. if you are owner of a company and your team decides to go with product Y because they believe it's a good product, you pay up for it. When after a while it looks like you are running into a bug and you go talk to your lawyers you will almost always return with empty hands. Why? Licenses! 99% of the commercial products in the world have licenses that protect the companies behind it in case bugs are found. Mostly the license states they should fix the problem but only if they deem the problem severe enough. Most of them actually do fix the bug but on their time and tempo It's even worse 99% of the products are bought through vendors and you are obliged to use them as intermediary party for your problems (like Christophe stated as comment on previous blogs!). If however you wish a feature implemented you might be further from home... All the valid reasons why you should ask support for products are invalid through legal reasoning. Nothing new here, a good thing is made (licensing, support contracts) but it's abused and twisted around until it is rendered unusable.

I have lost all confidence in support contracts and there are only a few products left that actually try to do it the correct way.

Someone stated that finding external knowledge as support for a certain product is hard and yes sometimes it isn't all that easy, but I prefer to search for knowledge a tad longer than to pay for support that isn't support (which is exactly that in most cases).

I rest my case and you can start bashing!