Well, people can accuse Microsoft of being many things but Microsoft was right in this case. I have a fully supported version of SUSE at work. Tonight we were testing our existing .NET and Mono apps against Mono 1.1.10, the latest. It broke one of our
apps. Upon our support call to Novell, they will not support Mono version 1.1.10, they will only support what was supplied, version 1.1.8. I asked, what were our options, only one was available, downgrade. And some people dont consider that a vendor lock-in.
Well, I consider when someone tells me what I can and cannot use and refuse to support their product on their own OS thats vendor lockin. I even spoke to the supervisor and he told me I could always go out to the web and get support and help that way. I
asked him; "If I have to rely on a news group, forum or mailing list then what the hell am I paying Novell for?"
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rjdohnert
You will never know success until you know failure
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draza
Bring It On
rjdohnert wrote:Well, people can accuse Microsoft of being many things but Microsoft was right in this case. I have a fully supported version of SUSE at work. Tonight we were testing our existing .NET and Mono apps against Mono 1.1.10, the latest. It broke one of our apps. Upon our support call to Novell, they will not support Mono version 1.1.10, they will only support what was supplied, version 1.1.8. I asked, what were our options, only one was available, downgrade. And some people dont consider that a vendor lock-in. Well, I consider when someone tells me what I can and cannot use and refuse to support their product on their own OS thats vendor lockin. I even spoke to the supervisor and he told me I could always go out to the web and get support and help that way. I asked him; "If I have to rely on a news group, forum or mailing list then what the hell am I paying Novell for?"
It's not called vendor lock-in. What you're experiencing here could be called a "moving target" problem.
You see, Linux world boasts about agility. If something is (slightly) broken, they issue a patch. This is nice from the "fast reaction to community complaints" department, but doesn't work well when you need to support gazillion versions of various pieces of the technology.
How many .NET Frameworks has Microsoft issued up to now? Three, and just a few service packs. This is not good as there are burning issues occassionally that are left unpatched for years, but is good from the standpoint of support as they have only a few versions to support.
As usual, the best would be to have regular supported service packs (every six months or so) and to obsolete sooner older versions. This would keep number of versions to a minimum and allow vendor to actively support them all. -
sbc
GW R/Me
Vendors should support updates that they send to you (i.e. via their auto-update system). But if you manually get the update yourself, it is understandable why they don't support you. Especially if you have to compile code for the update. If you got Mono 1.1.10 via automatic update, then they should support you, but I assume you didn't.
Also, just because a new version of something comes out doesn't mean you must upgrade - only do that if it is a security update, or you need one of the new features.
If you think about it though, it is much harder for Novell and RedHat to support customers. After all, there are far more packages for them to support than Microsoft does. What you get out of the box for Linux distributions is far more than what you get for Windows. They have to support third party applications (i.e. ones they did not fully code themselves). All Microsoft has to support is the software they wrote.
I wonder how many people actually go directly to Microsoft for support? Very few probably, as people are hired for IT support and they don't work for Microsoft. Newsgroups and forums are used by Microsoft customers as well.
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