One of the things that you hear over and over again is thatorganizations, including universities, often prefer to buy commercialsoftware instead of using open source (or building somethingthemselves). Often the ostensible reason is that when you buy from acompany, there is a legal entity that will provide support, or be heldaccountable when something doesn't work, or the like, and open sourcedoesn't have that.

System administrators often find this laughable, peculiar, andidiotic, and cannot understand why the

I would feel a lot more positive about vendorsupport if I didn't wind up wanting to grindmy teeth most times I had to interact with it. And one of the mostteeth-grinding aspects of it is the almost invariable feeling that thevendor support people are interacting with me not to solve the problembut to pawn me off with some (formulaic) answer.

One of the most glaring ways that this shows up is the generalassumption by front line support people that I don't actually have a