I'm using Ubuntu Edgy Eft with Beryl on my Dell Laptop. Everything is free and open source, and it all looks and behaves way much better than Vista.
Well, I had one nagging issue after playing with Beryl and "burning windows effects". Every new window created does not have focus. It was so annoying for some time. You open a new window, and then have to click the task bar to activate it. So I ran a Google query on "Ubuntu Beryl new window does not have foucs". Bingo! first hit on ubuntuforums and somebody had the same problem, and there is a link on how to fix it.
Another case I recently had was with PyYAML. It is an open source library that creates Python objects from YAML documents. Very neat. The problem was that my constructors were not being called when PyYAML created them. I searched here and there, nothing seemed helpful. So I opened a case just before leaving work with all the details. I got home and went online that night, and there was a very accurate reply to my case. It was less than one hour to get an answer that directly solves my problem.
How much are "you" paying for support? Must be a lot. And with places like "It Totally Sucks" that subbort may actually be worthless. I also have experience with other companies and things keep dragging, and requests for this trace and that log, and this custom code and that file and this configuration sometimes never end. And I end up making the fix myself, or at least have a workaround.
One recent trend is that open source applications are now targeting what used to be available from Big Name companies for what was very specialized tasks. It's not just editors, programming languages and spreadsheets anymore. Take Network Monitoring for example. There is Zenoss which is free and open source and give you similar features to some HP or IBM products sold for a large some of money.
Only thing we need is to convince management to use some of it :-)
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Ayman, these are solid arguments for the open source vs proprietary software debate. I think the challenge for IT Management is to first consider that open source is good if not better than the BIG NAME options and that community based support does work. I believe the open source movement understood the problem early on. Red Hat is the obvious example but there are lots of commercial companies who make money supporting open source products.
I heard from a friend in Saudi that open source ERP systems are helping a lot in proving to the big bosses in Saudi companies that the ERP concept is very beneficial for their businesses. But when it comes to deciding on which ERP to use, they always go for the BIG NAMES. What a petty.
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