Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: Coders 'have support concerns' over open source

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.... but open source/free softwares have nothing against commercial "support" or accountability.
Even debian can be made accountable by consultants , which are available from the home page .

If you are talking about feodora or say cvs trunk of X.org you are playing with softwares not only told as "no warranty" but as "This software will break it is meant to".

Just a note , reread the eula of all your commercial "closed source" products. The same applies. Have you ever though of asking oracle, microsoft , seagate to payback for the time you lost say for a disk failure, a legacy driver crashing the kernel, a virus going in because of a misconception in the protocol ?

The cases in which one could ask their money back is so slim does not take into account all those work hours lost .

For proprietary applications one can subscribe to beta, be confident that the software was testing in different environment and that s all.
With such projects as debian, you have the full application stack tested for monthes in a lot of environments.
There are a lot of derivate for different use who all contribute to the trunk :
xandros for SMB
knoppix : for testing, or even easy to setup light clients,
agnula for professional multimedia works.

Even the open nature of exchange allow an easy evaluation of a product : is it still maintained, how much users, fixes per bug, type of bugs, skill of the developpers,
planned features (above else , are those plans meant for now , testing their cvs version)

I sure prise accountability in case of failure. I would just balance it against avoiding failures.
And instead of reading benchmarks, have real statistics (most sources repository provides them).

Alban
Free software are not about free applications, but freedom to improve, share, extends.

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