Trusting operating systems: vendor or university?

[Dan Trottier]

In article <11812 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP writes:
>>In article <55239 at sun.uucp> limes at sun.uucp (Greg Limes) writes
>[pro vendor]:
>>>If the operating system does not work properly, the company gets
>>>bug reports and has to fix them
>
>In article <1133 at mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP
>(der Mouse) answers [pro university]:
>>They do?  In my experience they generally ignore the bug reports. ...
>>my notion of fixing a bug involves getting a fix to the person with
>>the problem within a week.
>
>(or at least a `hm, yes, that is a bug/ no, that is a feature | here
>is a workaround | we have no idea how to fix it yet but we are working
>on it', not dead silence: we can get dead silence from Berkeley for
>free :-) )

Well actually that's not quite fair. I remember bringing up 4.3 last May
and not being able to get the networking going. I placed a call to Berkeley
and got hold of Keith Bostic who went out of his way to find our problem.
We arranged to work on the problem on a Saturday over the phone! By the end
of the afternoon we had a work around and weeks later there was some bug
fixes circulated (diffs on paper... patch can't read paper :-) that fixed 
the problem. This is from an organization that admits it won't provide 
support! 

>
>>Not "in the next major release - and oh yes, that will cost you $2500[1]".

It would be nice to see companies give free upgrades to people who report
verifiable bugs. If a company was *really* interested in providing the best
possible software I would think they would encourage users to find and
report bugs!

Some companies sucker buyers into debuging software for them and then turn
around and sell the new and improved product. Of course those users that
spend the time to report the bugs receive nothing in return. 

>
>My own experience agrees with that of der Mouse, and applies to hardware
>vendors as well as software (viz. Emulex).  Bug reports never get any
>answer, though the bugs do sometimes get fixed.  Why should I pay for
>this `service' when UCB CSRG operates more or less the same way?  And in
>their case the silence is excusable (CSRG can be described as `five guys
>weilding source code', and there is no one left to answer bug reports).

I agree, mostly. It seems that response time varies with the complexity of
the bug. The real interesting bugs do seem to generate a response as do the
trivial. There are however a class a bugs that are in between that pose
problems not easily fixed and often require waiting for the next release of 
the software. The problem is getting past those people in charge of replying
to bug reports and talking to those who fix the bugs. 

Now what about the bug in /usr/ucb/Mail that doesn't reconize "dan" and
"dan at maccs" as being the same person! :-)

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