GNU and the issue of support

[Robert Lin]

Is it really true, that a free product like GNU would have no support?
No customer hand-holding? I wonder. The frustrating thing about the
present commercial UNIX products is that there are holes, big bugs, that
nobody really gets around to fix. We wait forever for things to get fixed,
and nothing ever happens.

If source code was freely available, you can be sure a dozen gurus on the
net would jump into the fray and produce bug fixes in a fraction of the time
it takes for any other commercial UNIX vendor.

Take GCC as a good example. People find bugs, bugs get posted, and a fixed
version comes, usually within the month. Even before then, you can generally
find patches for those people impatient for the new version.

And then there's the other myth, the lack of software support. Will we really
not have DOS support under GNU? Maybe in the first six months, yeah, but
before too long, someone will put together a DOS package. If not FSF itself,
which isn't at all interested in DOS integration, then a third party, a
local net guru, or someone like that.

I'd willingly and happily pay which ever commercial company good money, if
I can have the same level of openness that I'd get for free with GNU.
If whenever I report a bug, and they know its there, but can't fix it,
I'd like to receive a copy of the source code so I can fix it myself.

I'd even be willing to protect their commercial interest by signing a
non-disclosure, and after submitting my fixes, destory my copy.

Sure, it is expensive to support a product. Good tech support people are
hard to find, and harder to retain. As a software vendor myself, I can
sympathize with the cost of maintenance. But as a private individual,
a programmer, a guy who only wants to see a smoothly running system,
I cheer the arrival of GNU.

-Robert Lin <rlin at cs.ubc.ca>