Subject: Re: Customer Service
From: Patrick Callahan (pac1@tiac.net)
Date: Thu Nov 29 2001 - 05:29:41 MST
What did you actually pay for?
If you paid for nothing but downloaded the os and burned the CDs, did you get
what you paid for?
If you paid for installation support on top of the CD price, did you get it?
I'd bet you did and that you're up and running.
If you are like me you paid $29.95 for the service of getting three CDs full
of working software WITHOUT any customer support.
Installation assistance with your particular hardware and configuration is
NOT included for $29.99. How could it be? That kind of service is not
free.
The agreement between YDL and me is this: I bought 3 good CDs for $29.95 +
$10 shipping and they sent them. End of story.
Bad CDs are a fact of life. YDL is responsible for replacing them and when I
in fact got a bad one, I contacted them personally and they were quite
responsive. I had a complete new set of CDs in a few days. I think others
have had similar experiences.
Linux is an open freely available OS. It was not written by YDL. They don't
own the copyright to it. I think they do own the copyright to Yup which they
wrote. Their service is putting it all together so it can be installed on a
variety of macs and IBM servers. Not every mac is going to work. Not every
possible configuration of the macs that do work will work. Not even every
"supported" model will work. (its the software that supports the particular
hardware models, not the company)
In my own case, I've got a Blue G3 rev1. Its a "supported" model. I had my
extra EIDE drive hung off the CD. YDL 2.1 wouldn't install in that
configuration. I don't know why. I had to remove the extra EIDE drive.
Took me hours to figure this out. No big deal, but I didn't pay for
installation support and didn't expect any.
There may be other flaky hardware things that MacOS takes care of that Linux
does not. No one knows what they are. A flaky memory chip that may work
fine under MacOS might cause problems under Linux. You may not have enough
memory. You may need to zap your pram or re-partition your disk. You may
need to buy a new mac. You may run into these.
Read the GPL license. I don't think there's anything in there about
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
-Pat
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Nov 29 2001 - 05:42:21 MST