Trusting operating systems: vendor or university?

[Stephen J. Friedl]

In article <1133 at mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes:
>They do?  In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports.
 
In article <8013 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> This is heavily vendor-dependent.  For example, people at Gould would
> see a remark on the "gouldbugs" mailing list, draw up the SPR on my
> behalf, and send a timely response.  That's hard to beat.

I would have to assume that (in general) vendors would appreciate
getting technical feedback on their products.  Many of us
exercise software in ways the vendor is not likely, and our
reports and workarounds should help improve their products.

What vendors perhaps don't realize is that we would like feedback
on our feedback.  Let's face it, if we find a clever bug, we
would like to get some information on it: was it really a bug?
Have they heard it before?  Any word on a fix?  Did they get it?

I have sent in pages and pages of detailed bug reports to several
vendors (especially Microport and TeleVideo) and heard next to
nothing back from them.  A one-way feedback path gets old very
quickly.

Vendors might want to take a long-term view of this and be a
little more verbose in their feedback to their strongly technical
users who take the time to provide good reports.

-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442      3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl

Nancy Reagan on ptr args with a prototype in scope: "Just say NULL"