I helped introduce and support opensource software in corporate environments that are very intolerant of it. Don't get me wrong, I got it working ok but it is n

I helped introduce and support opensource software in corporate environments that are very intolerant of it. Don't get me wrong, I got it working ok but it is not for the faint of heart. If you don't have a team of skilled people who are willing and able to support OSS, then I firmly believe you shouldn't be using it. When I have critical bugs and outages I scramble to ask devs and OSS community for help. Sometimes I get help quick, other times it is months before anyone even has time to look at it. My priority is not mainatainers' priority. Not should it be. I have no feeling of entitlement to receive support/help and I am totally grateful for any given. Most HNers are devs/swe and of the startup/FAANG culture. In IT/Ops at orgs that have tech only to support their main objectives, this is how a bug/issue is handled: You get a ticket opened with the vendor and they fix it, maybe you get on a call with them asap. You have a need? If you pay them enough they will deliver. Is their product too hard to support? Or maybe it is just fine. IT folks bitch about it a bit and spend their time evaluating alternatives for the upcoming contract renewal. They don't fork things or create PRs. We use a product I won't name from a FAANG and their support is like OSS support as is the UX of it. I can tolerate it but everyone else complain and struggle so much with it! I had a critical feature needed for an OSS product, I searched and begged. Finally I forked an existing solution and got it to work (still works) but I can't upstream my work because it is now deprecated and they decided to do things differently (but not complete enough to meet my needs). I had another critical issue that caused many problems. I opened issues and talked to the devs a lot, eventually a kind dev recently worked with me to get it fixed after many months. I am fine with it, knew what I was getting into and accept the state of OSS. But good luck finding people that will do this full time and meet uptime/support SLA/KPI. It can be done, I have worked at a tech company with an army of devs and engineers do wonders with OSS. But having woked in a small and big teams outside of tech... yeah..I stand by my sentiment about accepting the state and support cost of OSS upfront. It is not OSS fault if you don't understand what you are getting into beforehand. Some of my favorite OSS that I support have bad reputation which I have and still am trying to fight because people thought it would be like commercial enterprise software: Install and you are done. Have issues? Call support. Developer suddenly decides to something random that affects you? Complain and threaten with some legal b.s. , that won't work in OSS. You need one or two people that are essentially contributing devs to the OSS software you plan on using. It only harms OSS when you promote it without understanding the requirements of your target audience.