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Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert

Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.

jonny_eh 9y ago
and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  Is it fair to say that kind of people that want to pay for an SFTP client for an automated process probably aren't doing much digging around on stackoverflow?
nulagrithom 9y ago
This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it." That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs. Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.
- lurker456 9y ago
  Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.
  - brazzledazzle 9y ago
    Many companies are paid handsomely to take the blame.
- taude 9y ago
  They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    ffs it's just FTP. All it needed was a scheduled task that called winscp pointed to a file containing a handful of flat FTP commands. If the guy who replaces me can't sort that out, how's he going to sort through my code? Besides, now it's some abomination wrapped inside a proprietary program that doesn't work right in the first place, only this time we're out the $x,xxx licensing costs and the entire process is opaque, with absolutely zero hope of sorting it out on our own. That's not a huge gain...

jonny_eh 9y ago

and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres

brazzledazzle 9y ago
Is it fair to say that kind of people that want to pay for an SFTP client for an automated process probably aren't doing much digging around on stackoverflow?

nulagrithom 9y ago

This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it." That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs. Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.

lurker456 9y ago
Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  Many companies are paid handsomely to take the blame.
taude 9y ago
They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  ffs it's just FTP. All it needed was a scheduled task that called winscp pointed to a file containing a handful of flat FTP commands. If the guy who replaces me can't sort that out, how's he going to sort through my code? Besides, now it's some abomination wrapped inside a proprietary program that doesn't work right in the first place, only this time we're out the $x,xxx licensing costs and the entire process is opaque, with absolutely zero hope of sorting it out on our own. That's not a huge gain...