I'm desperately trying to avoid a flame war, but I am very curious about a couple of things:Yes.
I am not trying to be biased but i was quit impress with the tools and SLA Microsoft has. And they solved our problem.
1. What kind of SLA will Microsoft offer to a small business or an individual user?
2. For the case above, where the poster spoke to a kernel developer, what kind of response was promised in the SLA and how much did it cost?
For the record, I use Windows, because a specific toolchain I need isn't going to be ported to Linux. But where I can (which is nearly everywhere else), I use Fedora, in fact, I do most of my email, "Office" work, and presentations using Linux. I've found Microsoft support to be expensive and antagonistic to customers. A recent experience bears this out.
I have an issue working for a friend now where MS support is needed. My friend entered "DLL Purgatory" because of a defect in a version of MSVCRT.DLL, used by just about everything on the system. The Knowledge Base article which discloses the defect announces a hotfix for the problem. But to get the hotfix, one must place a toll call to Microsoft and pay the charge for a service call to obtain the fix.
The Microsoft technician has the discretion to decide whether to charge you Microsoft's fee for the consultation, but in any event, you pay for the phone call. So no matter what you do, it will cost you money if you want your system to work. My friend didn't do anything except install Service Pack 2, and her system went south. Now her system is degraded and it will cost her to recover it.
For those who are unhappy with the support one gets from the Linux community for free, I must ask: Is this kind of support worth paying for? I am grateful for the support of this community. You all do great things.
Erik
