Hi All,

Without saying who (to protect the guilty), just thought I would replay a frustrating experience I had with a software vendor who supports RHEL 5. I reported a software defect on CentOS 5.7:

Quote:

Some tech support guys will do anything to close a ticket and ignore the customer. I eventually called him on the phone and he "reluctantly" agreed to send the report to the developers. Frustrating. How lazy can you get?

-T

Maybe they should consider the market share of CentOS versus RHEL. It would be interesting to have them explain why a GUI built from the same sources is "different".

Quote:

That would be interesting. He was surprised when I told him I reported CentOS bugs to Red Hat's Bugzilla.

I have had open source code criticized as having no support. This is not my experience. My experience is that a well written, documented, and respectful letter to the open source developer and/or bugzilla gets 1000 more attention than reporting a bug to a commercial developer. I can not think of the last time a commercial developer actually fixed a bug I reported. I just get manure like the above statement. When start a project, I first go to the Open Source and not just because it is free. The quality and functionality always tops the commercial stuff. This is a sad comment on the current state of commercial software.

And as far as no help, I had to call M$ support for something yesterday. The guy would not listen to a thing I told him. He had me repeat things I told him I had already done several time before. I finally gave up. I came up with interesting, inventive ways to Google the problem. I eventually pieced together the fix from three different Google posts. Geez! I was once told by Quick Books Point of Sale tech support (truly horrible support) that they could not report bugs to their developers, that they were barred from even speaking to them! Forums like this are 10 times more helpful than commercial support.

By the way, the market share link you gave me was for web servers. Do you have one on total usage?

Sorry for the soap box. I just needed to vent.

-T

Well, there's DistroWatch - CentOS currently #8, Red Hat #31, while Fedora is #3. I'm sure one could find more with a google on market share of linux distributions or similar.

Just to be a troll, I have found MS' dept for Office on Mac very helpful when some of our sales folk had trouble.

One has the feeling that as Apple folks working at MS, they feel special

If they would just put out M$ Office for Linux I bet those support folks would feel very special.

Ok, Phil, that was a literal LOL. BTW, it's too late for me to edit my previous post, can you correct the mistype of helpful as heplful?


I've even gotten good support from Oracle--maybe it's my winning manner. :)

You are now 100% correct - at least in the spelling department.

I suppose that technically, the GUI is different between CentOS and RHEL. RHEL 5 is mostly red while CentOS 5 is mostly blue. See, different!

Hmm. Now where is that spray?

Ah, ha. Found it . . .