“While the open source vendors get their support departments up
to snuff, it is possible to do without. For all the talk that CIOs
do not want to troll through Internet newsgroups to solve technical
problems, the companies that do so say it’s faster and more
effective than most commercial technical support. “Linux doesn’t
break that often, but when it does and the problem isn’t solved by
a reboot, our developers can either go into the source code and fix
it themselves or go out and interact with other Linux developers
through various [Web] sites,” says PlanetAll’s Robertson. “In 100
percent of cases where we have asked for developer help, somebody
has run into the problem before.”