Re: Support contracts (was Re: Commercial support?)

On Wednesday, Aug 13, 2003, at 15:58 US/Pacific, Gianni Mariani wrote:

> Ron Johnson wrote:
>
>> I *like* the fact that my company has a support contract with Oracle
>> on our production databases. DBMSs are extremely complicated beasts,
>> and even though I am expert,
>> and can extract the db from most stack dump conditions, there *are*
>> errors that are beyond my knowledge, but can be quickly solved by
>> someone who lives and breathes Rdb internals.

(just for clarity, I didn't write the above)

> That's Tom Lane right ? :-)

While I personally would want to keep a low profile if I were as
impressive a resource as some of the people on this list, I can say for
certain that I've got good answers to difficult questions (with
patches) from Tom Lane far faster than I've got worthless answers to
simple questions while on contract with competing database vendors.

I know that there are problems that I can't solve, but I've generally
had better luck solving technical problems with mailing lists and open
source than I have with support contracts and closed source.

...but I didn't start this thread because of technical problems. :)

--
Dustin Sallings