Why I choose open source

I’m fed of hearing people gripe that Open Source is unattractive to companies because there’s no support contract attached.

Yesterday I had a problem with an open source package manager we use called DarwinPorts. One of the packages, no matter how much I fiddled with it, wouldn’t install.

I posted a message to the mailing list at 2:58pm, and by 4pm I had received an email from the maintainer of the package to tell me that it was a genuine problem, and that it had now been fixed.

All for the princely sum of 0p and heartfelt thanks to Daniel Luke who fixed the problem.

How many commercial closed-source companies out there can claim this level of support?