A dvocates of open source products point out the reverse situation is really the case. Since the source code is available for all to see, the program code receives much more scrutiny than a commercial product ever will. Thousands of additional folks can discover issues and report them back to the source code maintainers. T he loose support approach for these products also makes folks nervous about committing to an implementation for their company. Most support is obtained by searching though forum and newsgroup postings, or by reading detailed product FAQs.
Many companies prefer the security of a real live software vendor to respond during a crisis.
T his need has spawned an entire network of retailers who will sell you the software bundled with additional technical support package . One example company which is having great success in marketing Linux and providing add-on support is Red Hat Software . The Big Boys join the Party R ecently the major technology companies have been slowly and quietly announcing support for these open source products. IBM recently announced that they will provide implementation support for the Apache HTTP Server on IBM products. All of the major database vendors have announced that they will supply versions of their products for the Linux operating system.