Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft

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1. nektar said:

   You say that there is 24-hour support and so you cannot accept contributions to the AJAX Library. However, as far as I know Microsoft support is not free of charge and it costs quite a lot: around 95$ for Visual Studio support I think. So, what is different from the other open source companies out there like Mysql which do accept user contributions and charge for support. They may even charge less than the Microsoft 95$ per insident and yet they do accept user contributions.

   One of the benefits of closed-source software like Windows is the support you supposedly get with it. However, Microsoft support costs so much that this benefit is non-existence for most of us. In fact Red Hat might even charge less for support and yet, unlike Microsoft, support is their only revenue.

   posted at 04:10AM 02/04/2007
2. Sam Ramji said:

   @nektar: You make a good point - particularly about Red Hat - and I think it comes down to core competencies.  

   In Red Hat's case they are primarily a support business (and not a software business).  There are a very specific number of supported configurations for Red Hat (note that they only support Red Hat Enterprise Linux, not Fedora, nor other distros like Debian or Slackware).  They spend time engineering these configurations (roughly 18 months per release), and design their ability to do support and troubleshooting based on this work.  As you point out, this may include community contributions (i.e. Fedora Core 5 --> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) after a significant amount of time spent testing and qualifying these contributions.

   Support is not Microsoft's business model.  We build & sell software, and don't derive our profits from support.  We sell support to cover our costs in enabling customers/developers to use our software.

   The type of support that Steve is talking about in this video is support for commercial entities who need to prevent interruptions to business, mission-critical applications (like commerce sites).    In my experience, non-commercial developers don't typically purchase support due to the costs (i.e. $1499/year for RHEL4 AS).  For these developers, mailing lists are a more common way of dealing with technical problems.

   For non-commercial developers, where as you point out, costs are an issue, I think we have some work to do.  [I am assuming from your comment that this is what you mean by "most of us".]  I'm very interested in this topic and would like to find a good solution.  What kind of support would you like to see for OSS developers on Microsoft technologies?

   posted at 11:47AM 02/05/2007
3. SteveMarx said:

   The ASP.NET AJAX forums (http://forums.asp.net/default.aspx?GroupID=34) are quite good for free support.  Not only do us Microsofties hang out there, but there's a pretty healthy community.  (Many questions get answered by other external-to-Microsoft developers.)

   We even pay some support engineers to spend time answering questions on the forums.

   posted at 04:54PM 02/05/2007
4. einhverfr said:

   I would be highly surprised if the reason for not accepting community patches is due to "we want to provide 24/7 support."  There is no reason that community patches cannot be properly vetted etc.

   A more likely explenation is that Microsoft, as a large company that many love to hate, is a bit of a litigation magnet.  As long as they have more control over the development of the library, it is less likely that someone can allege copyright infringement and use such lawsuits as a substitute for revenue generatio (ala The SCO Group).

   posted at 07:16PM 02/08/2007