I'm desperately trying to avoid a flame war, but I am very curious about a couple of things:
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.
This is the kind of "assurance" Microsoft does offer to customers: pay us for our faulty software. And they feel proud about it when they say Linux offers no protection or assurance. Ouch.
