Re: [tlug] wireless router: beginner advice

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Stuart Luppescu writes:

 > > It gives a list of OSes it works with, naturally not a mention of
 > > linux, but I'm puzzled where an OS fits in.
 > 
 > The OS should have nothing at all to do with it.

I suspect this is bureaucratic CYA.  Most first-line support staff are
pattern-matching automata: they match the question as asked by the
customer to one in a list, then spew back a script to be executed by
the customer, possibly translated back into the customer's vocabulary.

Apple and Microsoft vocabularies are standardized by their respective,
large vendors, with the vocabulary basically restricted to what
appears in the relevant dialogs.  To deal with a Linux customer, OTOH,
there are a large number of vendors, each has their own vocabulary,
and worse, there's a very high probability of running into a customer
with far more domain expertise than the support staff.

So they avoid mentioning Linux (or *BSD) in the hope that you won't
call them at all, and to give them an excuse to terminate the
conversation quickly rather than wasting Support's resources on a
query it likely can't handle cheaply anyway.  Then you go to your LUG
for help, right?

Wearing my economist hat, I think this is the way things *should*
work, unless the vendor wants to attract OSS-based customers.  But at
the low-price end, they probably don't.  (Why "should"?  Because
*some* OSS types will try anything and mostly they'll tell their LUGs,
information will collect at the LUG "hub", and people will pretty
quickly assign fairly reliable reputations to a few products that work
"well enough".  People who need more than that are probably
"sufficiently expert".  Vendor-provided services, OTOH, won't give you
accurate comparisons -- that's why Kakaku.com kuchikomi is an
essential service.)