Subject: RE: Customer Service
From: Little, Brian (brlittle@davidson.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 29 2001 - 06:38:59 MST
Hmm. Well, I'd argue that like it or not, there is an implication of support
when you market a software product. I'm not saying that such support does,
or should, exist. But the implication remains.
At all events, like you, I paid for three good CDs. I have only two good
CDs, and haven't received any further response from Terrasoft about
replacing the bad one, beyond their first email. You'll pardon me if I don't
consider this responsive customer service. I also don't expect help cooking
the beef I buy from the local market, but if it's bad, I most certainly
expect them to replace it. And when I do, they aren't deliberately
obfuscatory about how I should get in touch with them.
Brian
> ----------
> From: Patrick Callahan
> Reply To: yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com
> Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2001 7:29 AM
> To: yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com
> Subject: Re: Customer Service
>
> 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 - 06:51:46 MST