RE: [TCLUG:17041] <OT:anti-M$> *scary* stuff...

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> >In addition, commercial software publishers have met
> >certain minimum financial criteria that attest to their
> >ability to support their software on a continuing basis.
>
> Okay, this is kinda-sorta true.  If you're willing to pay
> the money, you can probably buy support.  Either way,
> though, that has nothing to do with the trustworthiness
> of the software - only the fact that you can get support
> for it.

There's another aspect to this, though.  If by "financial criteria" you mean
things like "is a registered corporation", "has a valid Taxpayer Identification
Number" and "has a corporate bank account at a stable financial institution",
then you can infer that this publisher is *not* going to be able to easily
vanish without leaving behind a paper trail.

Take this scenario for example.  We buy a piece of software from a "software
publisher" that is, in fact, a guy in a garage in Ohio.  The software turns out
to have a couple *major* stability issues that only pop up after months of use,
and our friendly publisher has *vanished*.  We don't have any information that
would enable us to track down where this guy went to -- from a corporate
standpoint, he doesn't exist.  We could try going through the Ohio phone books
looking for everybody with a name similar to "Bob Jones".  And, of course, the
software is closed-source, so actually fixing the bug ourselves is next to
impossible.

And, of course, there's the even more insidious version -- we buy software from
Fly-By-Night Software Ltd, and then discover it's a Trojan Horse program that
completely shreds our entire network.  We can't find a forwarding address for
FBNSoft, and, even worse, WE DON'T HAVE ANYBODY TO SUE.

Now, obviously, in the Open Source world, this isn't such an issue.  But with
closed source, financial stability equals "trustworthiness" with a high degree
of accuracy (although a better word might be "accountability").  This isn't an
endorsement of capitalism, it's an honest observation.  Even here at our
enlightened, Linux-friendly Credit Union, the Powers That Be have asked me to
use only Red Hat servers because (among other reasons) if we ever incur a loss
because of something related to our servers, we'll have a much better chance of
obtaining meaningful compensation from Red Hat than, say, Slackware.

You can argue that there's something wrong with this system -- and I'd probably
agree with you.  But as long as there remain a significant number of developers
who haven't seen the blinding light of Open Source, these are the rules that you
have to play by.

--
Eric Hillman
UNIX Sysadmin/Webmaster
City & County Credit Union
ehillman@cccu.com