Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--0f3d4c-There's a free market for supp/en

There's a free market for support. So, any business that cares about support will find a tremendous advantage in free software. With proprietary software, support is a monopoly, because one company has the source code, or maybe a small number of companies that paid a gigantic amount of money have the source code, if it's Microsoft's shared source program, but, it's very few. And so, there aren't very many possible sources of support for you. And that means, that unless you're a real giant, they don't care about you. Your company is not important enough for them to care if they lose your business, or what happens. Once you're using the program, they figure you're locked in to getting the support from them, because to switch to a different program is a gigantic job. So, you end up with things like paying for the privilege of reporting a bug. [Laughter] And once you've paid, they tell you, &ldquo;Well, OK, we've noted your bug report. And in a few months, you can buy an upgrade, and you can see if we've fixed it.&rdquo; [Laughter]