As a Windows/VMWare/Exchange/Cisco admin, this is all completely foreign to me. Does this indirectly make a case for paying a vendor real money to manage their

As a Windows/VMWare/Exchange/Cisco admin, this is all completely foreign to me. Does this indirectly make a case for paying a vendor real money to manage their product properly? All vendors we work with provide installers that handle installing any dependencies. Updates are a few clicks. Occasionally we run into a vendor who provides installation/upgrade instructions, that involve manually copying files and hand editing config files. We replace those vendors. Error-prone people should not be doing manual file copying/editing or dependency checking, tasks that computers are dozens or orders of magnitude more competent at. This is B2B stuff where businesses should manage their product or risk getting sued out of business. The current environment seems to be that using free or opensource products is "free, with purchase of a team of consultants". Why not just pay the money to a vendor to provide, and support, a real product? It seems backwards to call this a sad state of sysadmin. This is like Boeing providing its leftover parts and a 9000 page manual on 747 assembly, and people complaining about the "sad state of mechanics". That's backwards. Buy a 747 from Boeing if that's what you need.