[qwasty]

hmm, I think you anti-commercial software folks are a bit out of touch. I've been shopping for commercial software, and buying it, even if it's not as good as the free stuff, simply because of the quality and quantity of the service. What good is free software if it has a bug I can't figure out, and no one wants to take responsibility for it? What good is free software if the developer gets married and leaves his product to rot? If someone's making money on a product, I feel much more secure in investing my time, money, energy, and other resources into integrating that product into my life/business/hobbies/whatever, because the people making money are dependent on making me happy.

I've bought 3 "cheesy" web software packages during the last week. When I say "cheesy", I mean it's not business related, or anything elite or professional. It's silly things like chat applets and tagboards. Everyone one of those products I've bought has been easy to install, easy to configure, easy to run, fast, efficient, unobtrusive, and generally well programmed. On top of that, each vendor responded to support request within a few HOURS of me sending them an email. All of the free software products I WAS going to use goes in the garbage because, after 3 months of hassles, most of them aren't working, or I'm still waiting for support, or they just plain suck.

I was attracted to this vBArticles mod, but it looks complex, and I'm seeing where people are having troubles getting rid of it, and it seems like the kind of thing that "takes over" your system. All of that would be OK if I could expect someone to help me solve those problems, but since there's no professionally done commercial version, I don't expect anything but problems, just like most of the other "hacks" that are out there.

So, to sum up, when I use commercial software, things go smoothly and quickly. That's worth more than money.

Simply put, if I pay for it, I expect quality. If it's free, I expect to get what I paid for. I think that applies even to the best free software...the kind where companies make money off of it by providing support...which further motivates them to "improve" the software in ways that make it problematic for anyone but an expert.