Kara wrote...

>Being able to pick up the phone and call HP (or another vendor) for support
>or for fixes means a tremendous amount to me. (...) If I have a choice, I
will
>choose a supported licensed product over freeware for any "mission-critical"
>application.

Don't confuse free software (Public Domain, Open Source, Freeware, or whatever
the flavour is called) with "no commercial support available". As far as I do
recall the Samba web site in Australia, for example, although I haven't
checked
www.samba.org lately, they did have a reference list of companies offering
commercial support for the freeware.

The software is free, the service is for charge. So there is surely the option
to "pick up the phone and get some help", maybe not always a "big name"
company
but the service quality might be more important than the nameplate...

Lars.

PS: Also see http://webreview.com/wr/pub/freeware/origins.html (still
valid?)