You buy your burgers premade! I eat burgers frequently, but I make them myself. it would never occur to me to purchase them premade. Just grind the meat, take a bunch of the result, mix it up with some garlic and onions, and a few other species, then pack it gently with your hands, and that's it!
it's the grease in the meat that keep it together. You don't need anything else.
You are right, no sane enterprise will use cheap hardware and free software to run such a service. Imagine if google used nothing but cheap x86 hardware and free software to run their operation, instead of the huge IBM mainframes they have now.
I love how lately saying the truth is flamebaiting/trolling.
What issue was there back in 2003?
Microsoft tried to steer the market away from TCP/IP. It took them ages to get proper TCP/IP support, and when they did, they stole most of it from BSD (this was proven in the famous windows 2k code leak). They hate standards because it makes it harder to lock in their customers. NTLM is nothing but crapware designed to lock-in people. Really, explain WHAT exactly is it that NTLM solves/fixes, now or 10 years ago?
Ah, you are right. That's why MySQL has a bigger marketshare than mssql, all serious mailservers use either sendmail, postfix or qmail, and LibreOffice is close to a 25% market share.
They keep coming up with more retarded, proprietary technologies that don't seem to solve any particular issue, and are solutions looking for a problem... and eventually turn into huge problems themselves.
I repeat this every time we talk about ads on the web, but I'll say it again: It's bullshit that the web can't survive without ads.
People that insist they depend on ads, and go "Wouldn't you miss our web if we went out of business? Click our ads!" remind me of some pirates. Not the ones that just post content on bittorrent... no, I'm talking about the ones that run a blog with movie or music downloads, and put captchas and other measures to make sure you don't crawl their DB. Some watermark their movies. They put their download links behind adfly. And insist you turn off adblock! They say you are stealing from them by not watching their ads. Oh, the hypocrisy!. So, the studios, the directors and the actors do all the work and spend all the money, but you think they should get nothing, and you come along, download a rip, reupload it somewhere, and think YOU are the one that deserves compensation?
I feel exactly the same way about idiots with a website that say the web wouldn't be the same without them, therefore we must either pay for their content or swallow their ads. The reason why you can run a website so cheaply is simple: WE created GNU/Linux, apache, PHP and MySQL! And also the Webkit and Gecko engines, and the Free browsers that use them to display your content, and Wordpress, joomla, mambo, etc. Even the free templates you use, and the free iconsets.
Most people don't realize this, but what made the Internet so fucking HUGE was Free Software. Cisco is fucking expensive, So is IIS, and Windows, and Unix. If we wanted to replace all of the free software supporting the internet for their paid counterparts, all the money in the world wouldn't be enough.
If we removed GNU/Linux and Apache from the internet, 70% of all servers would go down, and there would be nobody to visit them anyway since 99% of all SOHO routers run GNU/Linux. Without GNU/Linux there would most likely be no Google, and therefore no adsense. If Google or Facebook had to pay licenses for every server they run, they wouldn't be profitable. If most websites had to pay for a CMS, then host it on a server with Windows, IIS, Oracle, and fucking winzip, they wouldn't make money selling ads anyway! That is, the cost of delivering each ad would be HIGHER than the revenue.
So, what you guys are telling me is that we as a community where able to create the most amazing software ever created, and use it to power the most incredible network the world has ever seen, FOR FREE, but the dick jokes and cat pictures you post are priceless works of art and require endless streams of ad-money to be generated? I say go away, and take your content with you. Or find a better revenue stream. Or do it for free. If you don't, we certainly will.
I did read the whole thread. Here's how it went down:
Linus was in a good mood: "The longest night of the year is upon us (*), and what better thing to do than get yourself some nice mulled wine, sit back, relax, and play with the most recent rc kernel?"
Then Rafael politely explained the issue he was having, and posted a patch that fixed it for him. The message was directed to Laurent.
Mauro kidnapped the message addressed to Laurent, and replied attacking Rafael: "Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. Btw, why pulseaudio is even trying to access a V4L2 control? I would expect an audio application to take care of its own audio business, and to not try to access other random Kernel APIs. In other words, only an application that handles video should be using those controls, and as far as I know, pulseaudio is not a such application. Or are it trying to do world domination? So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions."
Linus stepped in and kicked Mauro's ass for being an asshole.
Laurent finally replied to Rafael's message and agree with him.
Mauro could have just STFU, or agreed with Rafael, or wait for Laurent/ask Laurent for his input. Instead he disregarded the bug report, and tried to blame the pulseaudio devs.
Don't get me wrong, Linus IS an asshole sometimes, and I, like everybody else, have suffered pulseaudio and I'd like to see it go away, But in this case, Linus did the right thing, and pulseaudio was not to blame.
Except/. is what IT is made of. This is what we are. We're not socially retarded, the rest of the world is socially retarded. Being politically correct? Asking nicely? What is this, the Victorian era? Fuck you. We're socially efficient. We work the way software works.
A stupid maintainer did something stupid. Linus noticed, and the dev tried to excuse himself with bullshit. If the dev had been honest, and said "Sorry, I fucked up. My bad", the reply would've been quite different. And if the dev knew for sure he was right and Linus was not, he would've replied with "Fuck you Linus, here's why I'm right..." and not with the blurt of apologies he replied with.
There, you just cloned one of my vmware instance's mac.
Trusting your switch is ridiculous. Routing provides true isolation, but still, any real security has to be implemented in several layers. Ignoring the application layer and trusting your network is a recipe for disaster.
Well, most atheists just don't really go into the details of this superstitions, they stop at declaring them superstitions.
The only Atheist I can think of that put aside the fact that there is no god and went to the core, to how christianity is essentially wrong in every way, and it teaches bad lessons regardless of how fictional they might be was Nietzsche, in the Antichrist.
I usually insist on that stuff. I tell people "Well, for the sake of argument, let's say your god does exist. Then our biggest priority should be to murder him, to eliminate him completely. All religions are bullshit, but some, such as Buddhism are at least well written, teach good morals, and have actually interesting stories. Christianism doesn't even offer literary value.
It's the kind of shit I don't understand about Scientology. If you are going to believe a sci-fi book is the actual, hard truth, at least pick something by Asimov, or any other writer worth a fuck!
It's even sadder, actually. There were a lot of psychotic idiots back then saying they where the messiah. Everyone just ignored them for the most part.
Sad story is, there never was even a historical jesus either, superpowers or not.
Religion is a form of violence. It's violence against reason, against the human mind, against everything that is good and pure in humans. Religion is the worst kind of violence.
I actually don't see the slightest difference. Both christianity and what this guy does are fictional stories, filled with gore, and have the purpose of making money.
The difference is that this guy has a small audience, and he hasn't killed anyone or harmed any humans while making his videos, while christianism has fucked up society for 2000 years.
So, not the same at all. What this guy does is shitty art you might like or not. christianity is genocide.
The problem lies with Verizon and AT&T. I speak from a decade of experience working for carriers. Verizon, AT&T and other behemoths actively discriminate against small carriers, by enforcing several policies that make it impossible for them to purchase direct routes. Logic says that a straight line is the shortest path, but in the current state of telephony, it's sometimes prohibitively expensive.
Things Verizon requests for an interconnect:
- Lots of traffic. The prepaids are huge, that alone eliminates over 75% of all carriers.
- Proprietary bias. They prefer H.323 and other obsolete technologies. Their H.323 implementation (up to and including codecs) is designed to work mostly with cisco, and is not very asterisk-friendly.
- If you request SIP as a more rational approach to interconnection, sales will screw with you for weeks. When you finally manage to get authorization for a SIP interconnect, they notify you the traffic quota for SIP is even higher, requiring an increase in the monthly prepaid. Then they just send you an example cisco configuration and a few doc files with misleading information.
- Then the bureaucracy starts. If you aren't connecting with cisco equipment, and you aren't prepaying shitloads of traffic, they'll drive you insane with red tape.
- When you go through the cisco file you end up understanding what you need to interconnect with them:
- They will send and accept traffic from ONLY ONE IP, through an IPSec tunnel. If you require additional IPs, it'll mean another interconnection, and it'll cost you. And, yes, that's right, you have to send your SIP signalling through an IPSec tunnel, then reinvite all media. But they'll only accept reinvites to pre-defined hosts (up to 8), so you can't reinvite traffic directly to your customers, and therefore you must afford all the extra bandwidth costs associated.
- Of course, getting such a setup to work will require some testing and debugging, which will be extremely hard as their support department refuses to work with you or give you any feedback if you aren't using cisco/nortel/netgear etc. If you are using FOSS, you are SOL.
- Finally, going through all this steps will take anywhere from 45 to 90 days.
- Let's say you need to migrate one of your server (common in 99% of all carriers, since they don't own a fucking datacenter, and they collocate their equipment). Or you need to add a new one. Adding a new server will take at least 30 days. Just changing the IP address of one of your servers will take ~15 days.
- Even after you've got everything working, they'll do stuff such as sending you an email saying they'll discontinue the platform you are working on in 15 days, and you need to migrate. Or you need to stop using a particular codec. Or you need to change some other arbitrary thing. That'll, again, make you loose traffic, and therefore money.
AT&T, BT, and all other industry behemoths have similar practices. Some will even force you to collocate equipment at their locations. This means It's extremely expensive for small carriers to purchase directly from them. So they buy from other carriers. But again, this other carriers are still too small to purchase directly from the actual Tier-1 bastards, so they purchase from somebody else too. In the end, It's cheaper to buy from some small provider that is still bigger that still has 2 or 3 hops before getting to the big guys than purchasing directly from them. That is Verizon's fault.
So, yeah, you end up purchasing from some carrier with huge latency, and poor peering, but he offers you a simple IAX2 trunk right away, you can send traffic from any IP, you can just call support, and there are no traffic quotas. You can just prepay through paypal as you go. And that's better than having to deal with verizon.
This is just one of many reasons why I don't work on telephony anymore, and one of the reasons I try to call PSTN lines as little as possible.
This guys are hypocrites, blaming others when they are the only ones to blame.
a) It helps people understand that if they want support, they must pay. b) It also allows us to actually enforce our support policies legally. It's cumbersome to make every customer that needs support sign an actual contract, so what we do is we put the support contract in the EULA. If you have a product installed that entitles you to support, you've already agreed to the rules to use our support. If you don't comply with the rules, you loose the license to the software and therefore the support, and you are welcome to go back to the GPL version. Simple as that.
Here's how the asshole you are replying to reasons:
If I paid for the software, it's logical that'll have to pay for support. If the software was free, I am not paying for the support either.
Guess what? Most proprietary software comes with no support whatsoever, or a just a very basic and unhelpful helpdesk, if you want actual support you'll have to get a support contract, and pay through the nose. But of course, that's not bait and switch because the company doing it charged you for the product. That's flawless logic right there.
It actually costs my company money to develop products. Sure, some Free Software products are done on the side, on free time, by a couple of people. Others are major enterprises that take vast resources to produce. Do you think we could have Apache, or Mozilla, or Google Chrome without huge corporations or foundations with massive resources backing them?
We are based in Argentina, and, while most of our products are proprietary, they are FS/OSS-friendly ( as in, they run on GNU/Linux, offer open APIs and interfaces, are standards-compliant, etc.). Recently, we released one of our products under the GPL, and we are getting the same kind of calls.
It's not something that worries me. Here's how we deal with it: All of our employees are Free Software advocates (That's by design, we mostly hunt for employees in LUGs, both physical and online). They understand the issue, and they know how to explain it. Our usual metaphors include food-based explanations (we create free recipes that you can download for free, and cook/modify/share as you please, but if you want us to go to your house and cook for you, you have to pay, or if you want a printed book with our recipes, that has a price too. We also use other metaphors, such as Music (the music is free to download, if you want the band to play at your party, or you want to go to a concert, you pay for it).
Most people understand, some people don't. Those that don't are your average crappy customers, that would do the same kind of stuff even if the software weren't free. The people that call our system a scam are the same kind of customers that buy our non-free solutions and demand exceptional things, such as this woman who recently filed a complaint because she wanted us to go to her business and install free temporary replacement hardware while we processed a repair on a 4 year old system whose warranty had expired. Or the people that buy our DVR/NVR solution, connect a crappy 420TVL CCTV camera to it, configure the system in 320x240, and call complaining they can't see a license plate at 100 meters distance, and demand we send them a technician for free. Or schools that purchase our e-learning solution and demand that we go to their institution, for free, as many times as necessary, to teach their professors how to use it. Also, people react the same way with plugins and software updates. We offer free upgrades for life on many of our systems, and people call and demand specific, custom features, in a short timeframe, and then get irate when we explain that free upgrades for life doesn't mean unlimited custom development for free.
Some customers are great, and some customers are demanding, self-entitled, annoying, loud bitches who want to scam free work out of you while pretending that themselves are being scammed by you. That's how it works, regardless of the license of the product.
Our solution: We've split our product into two independent products. One of them is GPL and comes with NO SUPPORT WHATSOEVER, and explain that very clearly on our webpage. The other one is proprietary, and has several support contracts available. By making them clearly different products (while the codebase is exactly the same), we've cut down on complains. That, and good people with a clear understanding of Free Software manning the phones. And a lot of patience.
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You buy your burgers premade! I eat burgers frequently, but I make them myself. it would never occur to me to purchase them premade. Just grind the meat, take a bunch of the result, mix it up with some garlic and onions, and a few other species, then pack it gently with your hands, and that's it!
it's the grease in the meat that keep it together. You don't need anything else.
You are right, no sane enterprise will use cheap hardware and free software to run such a service. Imagine if google used nothing but cheap x86 hardware and free software to run their operation, instead of the huge IBM mainframes they have now.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/FACTORY-MK808-Mini-PC-Android-TV-box-4-1-Dual-Core-1-6-GHz-RAM-1GB/707744275.html
I have one. they exist. They're no game-changer.
What the fuck are you talking about, you retard?
I love how lately saying the truth is flamebaiting/trolling.
What issue was there back in 2003?
Microsoft tried to steer the market away from TCP/IP. It took them ages to get proper TCP/IP support, and when they did, they stole most of it from BSD (this was proven in the famous windows 2k code leak). They hate standards because it makes it harder to lock in their customers. NTLM is nothing but crapware designed to lock-in people. Really, explain WHAT exactly is it that NTLM solves/fixes, now or 10 years ago?
Ah, you are right. That's why MySQL has a bigger marketshare than mssql, all serious mailservers use either sendmail, postfix or qmail, and LibreOffice is close to a 25% market share.
Why the fuck people still trust microsoft?
They keep coming up with more retarded, proprietary technologies that don't seem to solve any particular issue, and are solutions looking for a problem ... and eventually turn into huge problems themselves.
I repeat this every time we talk about ads on the web, but I'll say it again: It's bullshit that the web can't survive without ads.
People that insist they depend on ads, and go "Wouldn't you miss our web if we went out of business? Click our ads!" remind me of some pirates. Not the ones that just post content on bittorrent ... no, I'm talking about the ones that run a blog with movie or music downloads, and put captchas and other measures to make sure you don't crawl their DB. Some watermark their movies. They put their download links behind adfly. And insist you turn off adblock! They say you are stealing from them by not watching their ads. Oh, the hypocrisy!. So, the studios, the directors and the actors do all the work and spend all the money, but you think they should get nothing, and you come along, download a rip, reupload it somewhere, and think YOU are the one that deserves compensation?
I feel exactly the same way about idiots with a website that say the web wouldn't be the same without them, therefore we must either pay for their content or swallow their ads. The reason why you can run a website so cheaply is simple: WE created GNU/Linux, apache, PHP and MySQL! And also the Webkit and Gecko engines, and the Free browsers that use them to display your content, and Wordpress, joomla, mambo, etc. Even the free templates you use, and the free iconsets.
Most people don't realize this, but what made the Internet so fucking HUGE was Free Software. Cisco is fucking expensive, So is IIS, and Windows, and Unix. If we wanted to replace all of the free software supporting the internet for their paid counterparts, all the money in the world wouldn't be enough.
If we removed GNU/Linux and Apache from the internet, 70% of all servers would go down, and there would be nobody to visit them anyway since 99% of all SOHO routers run GNU/Linux. Without GNU/Linux there would most likely be no Google, and therefore no adsense. If Google or Facebook had to pay licenses for every server they run, they wouldn't be profitable. If most websites had to pay for a CMS, then host it on a server with Windows, IIS, Oracle, and fucking winzip, they wouldn't make money selling ads anyway! That is, the cost of delivering each ad would be HIGHER than the revenue.
So, what you guys are telling me is that we as a community where able to create the most amazing software ever created, and use it to power the most incredible network the world has ever seen, FOR FREE, but the dick jokes and cat pictures you post are priceless works of art and require endless streams of ad-money to be generated? I say go away, and take your content with you. Or find a better revenue stream. Or do it for free. If you don't, we certainly will.
Wow. 100% efficiency? And 350% too?
Please, let us know when you will start producing free energy for the entire world.
I did read the whole thread. Here's how it went down:
Linus was in a good mood: "The longest night of the year is upon us (*), and what better thing to do than get yourself some nice mulled wine, sit back, relax, and play with the most recent rc kernel?"
Then Rafael politely explained the issue he was having, and posted a patch that fixed it for him. The message was directed to Laurent.
Mauro kidnapped the message addressed to Laurent, and replied attacking Rafael: "Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the
returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio. Btw, why pulseaudio is even trying to access a V4L2 control? I would expect an audio application to take care of its own audio business, and to not try to access other random Kernel APIs. In other words, only an application that handles video should be using those controls, and as far as I know, pulseaudio is not a such application. Or are it trying to do world domination? So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions."
Linus stepped in and kicked Mauro's ass for being an asshole.
Laurent finally replied to Rafael's message and agree with him.
Mauro could have just STFU, or agreed with Rafael, or wait for Laurent/ask Laurent for his input. Instead he disregarded the bug report, and tried to blame the pulseaudio devs.
Don't get me wrong, Linus IS an asshole sometimes, and I, like everybody else, have suffered pulseaudio and I'd like to see it go away, But in this case, Linus did the right thing, and pulseaudio was not to blame.
Except /. is what IT is made of. This is what we are. We're not socially retarded, the rest of the world is socially retarded. Being politically correct? Asking nicely? What is this, the Victorian era? Fuck you. We're socially efficient. We work the way software works.
A stupid maintainer did something stupid. Linus noticed, and the dev tried to excuse himself with bullshit. If the dev had been honest, and said "Sorry, I fucked up. My bad", the reply would've been quite different. And if the dev knew for sure he was right and Linus was not, he would've replied with "Fuck you Linus, here's why I'm right ..." and not with the blurt of apologies he replied with.
Our system works. Leave it alone.
ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:50:56:c0:00:01
There, you just cloned one of my vmware instance's mac.
Trusting your switch is ridiculous. Routing provides true isolation, but still, any real security has to be implemented in several layers. Ignoring the application layer and trusting your network is a recipe for disaster.
I prefer this one : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1958067/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Well, most atheists just don't really go into the details of this superstitions, they stop at declaring them superstitions.
The only Atheist I can think of that put aside the fact that there is no god and went to the core, to how christianity is essentially wrong in every way, and it teaches bad lessons regardless of how fictional they might be was Nietzsche, in the Antichrist.
I usually insist on that stuff. I tell people "Well, for the sake of argument, let's say your god does exist. Then our biggest priority should be to murder him, to eliminate him completely. All religions are bullshit, but some, such as Buddhism are at least well written, teach good morals, and have actually interesting stories. Christianism doesn't even offer literary value.
It's the kind of shit I don't understand about Scientology. If you are going to believe a sci-fi book is the actual, hard truth, at least pick something by Asimov, or any other writer worth a fuck!
It's even sadder, actually. There were a lot of psychotic idiots back then saying they where the messiah. Everyone just ignored them for the most part.
Sad story is, there never was even a historical jesus either, superpowers or not.
No, you are right, it's not a movie that defines christians. It's an ~1800 year old book with poor grammar and little consistency/cohesion.
Damn, that's actually worse.
Religion is a form of violence. It's violence against reason, against the human mind, against everything that is good and pure in humans. Religion is the worst kind of violence.
I actually don't see the slightest difference. Both christianity and what this guy does are fictional stories, filled with gore, and have the purpose of making money.
The difference is that this guy has a small audience, and he hasn't killed anyone or harmed any humans while making his videos, while christianism has fucked up society for 2000 years.
So, not the same at all. What this guy does is shitty art you might like or not. christianity is genocide.
The problem lies with Verizon and AT&T. I speak from a decade of experience working for carriers. Verizon, AT&T and other behemoths actively discriminate against small carriers, by enforcing several policies that make it impossible for them to purchase direct routes. Logic says that a straight line is the shortest path, but in the current state of telephony, it's sometimes prohibitively expensive.
Things Verizon requests for an interconnect:
- Lots of traffic. The prepaids are huge, that alone eliminates over 75% of all carriers.
- Proprietary bias. They prefer H.323 and other obsolete technologies. Their H.323 implementation (up to and including codecs) is designed to work mostly with cisco, and is not very asterisk-friendly.
- If you request SIP as a more rational approach to interconnection, sales will screw with you for weeks. When you finally manage to get authorization for a SIP interconnect, they notify you the traffic quota for SIP is even higher, requiring an increase in the monthly prepaid. Then they just send you an example cisco configuration and a few doc files with misleading information.
- Then the bureaucracy starts. If you aren't connecting with cisco equipment, and you aren't prepaying shitloads of traffic, they'll drive you insane with red tape.
- When you go through the cisco file you end up understanding what you need to interconnect with them:
- They will send and accept traffic from ONLY ONE IP, through an IPSec tunnel. If you require additional IPs, it'll mean another interconnection, and it'll cost you. And, yes, that's right, you have to send your SIP signalling through an IPSec tunnel, then reinvite all media. But they'll only accept reinvites to pre-defined hosts (up to 8), so you can't reinvite traffic directly to your customers, and therefore you must afford all the extra bandwidth costs associated.
- Of course, getting such a setup to work will require some testing and debugging, which will be extremely hard as their support department refuses to work with you or give you any feedback if you aren't using cisco/nortel/netgear etc. If you are using FOSS, you are SOL.
- Finally, going through all this steps will take anywhere from 45 to 90 days.
- Let's say you need to migrate one of your server (common in 99% of all carriers, since they don't own a fucking datacenter, and they collocate their equipment). Or you need to add a new one. Adding a new server will take at least 30 days. Just changing the IP address of one of your servers will take ~15 days.
- Even after you've got everything working, they'll do stuff such as sending you an email saying they'll discontinue the platform you are working on in 15 days, and you need to migrate. Or you need to stop using a particular codec. Or you need to change some other arbitrary thing. That'll, again, make you loose traffic, and therefore money.
AT&T, BT, and all other industry behemoths have similar practices. Some will even force you to collocate equipment at their locations. This means It's extremely expensive for small carriers to purchase directly from them. So they buy from other carriers. But again, this other carriers are still too small to purchase directly from the actual Tier-1 bastards, so they purchase from somebody else too. In the end, It's cheaper to buy from some small provider that is still bigger that still has 2 or 3 hops before getting to the big guys than purchasing directly from them. That is Verizon's fault.
So, yeah, you end up purchasing from some carrier with huge latency, and poor peering, but he offers you a simple IAX2 trunk right away, you can send traffic from any IP, you can just call support, and there are no traffic quotas. You can just prepay through paypal as you go. And that's better than having to deal with verizon.
This is just one of many reasons why I don't work on telephony anymore, and one of the reasons I try to call PSTN lines as little as possible.
This guys are hypocrites, blaming others when they are the only ones to blame.
Indeed. It helps in two ways:
a) It helps people understand that if they want support, they must pay.
b) It also allows us to actually enforce our support policies legally. It's cumbersome to make every customer that needs support sign an actual contract, so what we do is we put the support contract in the EULA. If you have a product installed that entitles you to support, you've already agreed to the rules to use our support. If you don't comply with the rules, you loose the license to the software and therefore the support, and you are welcome to go back to the GPL version. Simple as that.
Here's how the asshole you are replying to reasons:
If I paid for the software, it's logical that'll have to pay for support.
If the software was free, I am not paying for the support either.
Guess what? Most proprietary software comes with no support whatsoever, or a just a very basic and unhelpful helpdesk, if you want actual support you'll have to get a support contract, and pay through the nose. But of course, that's not bait and switch because the company doing it charged you for the product. That's flawless logic right there.
Support for free? Are you insane?
It actually costs my company money to develop products. Sure, some Free Software products are done on the side, on free time, by a couple of people. Others are major enterprises that take vast resources to produce. Do you think we could have Apache, or Mozilla, or Google Chrome without huge corporations or foundations with massive resources backing them?
We are based in Argentina, and, while most of our products are proprietary, they are FS/OSS-friendly ( as in, they run on GNU/Linux, offer open APIs and interfaces, are standards-compliant, etc.). Recently, we released one of our products under the GPL, and we are getting the same kind of calls.
It's not something that worries me. Here's how we deal with it: All of our employees are Free Software advocates (That's by design, we mostly hunt for employees in LUGs, both physical and online). They understand the issue, and they know how to explain it. Our usual metaphors include food-based explanations (we create free recipes that you can download for free, and cook/modify/share as you please, but if you want us to go to your house and cook for you, you have to pay, or if you want a printed book with our recipes, that has a price too. We also use other metaphors, such as Music (the music is free to download, if you want the band to play at your party, or you want to go to a concert, you pay for it).
Most people understand, some people don't. Those that don't are your average crappy customers, that would do the same kind of stuff even if the software weren't free. The people that call our system a scam are the same kind of customers that buy our non-free solutions and demand exceptional things, such as this woman who recently filed a complaint because she wanted us to go to her business and install free temporary replacement hardware while we processed a repair on a 4 year old system whose warranty had expired. Or the people that buy our DVR/NVR solution, connect a crappy 420TVL CCTV camera to it, configure the system in 320x240, and call complaining they can't see a license plate at 100 meters distance, and demand we send them a technician for free. Or schools that purchase our e-learning solution and demand that we go to their institution, for free, as many times as necessary, to teach their professors how to use it. Also, people react the same way with plugins and software updates. We offer free upgrades for life on many of our systems, and people call and demand specific, custom features, in a short timeframe, and then get irate when we explain that free upgrades for life doesn't mean unlimited custom development for free.
Some customers are great, and some customers are demanding, self-entitled, annoying, loud bitches who want to scam free work out of you while pretending that themselves are being scammed by you. That's how it works, regardless of the license of the product.
Our solution: We've split our product into two independent products. One of them is GPL and comes with NO SUPPORT WHATSOEVER, and explain that very clearly on our webpage. The other one is proprietary, and has several support contracts available. By making them clearly different products (while the codebase is exactly the same), we've cut down on complains. That, and good people with a clear understanding of Free Software manning the phones. And a lot of patience.
You are so mature. When I grow up I want to be just like you.
I can (and do) throw a party whenever the fuck I want, without endorsing mass delusion.