In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

> Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine)

My impression was always the arguments were more like "Well yes, but we have this literal building full of technical manuals that describe every bolt and screw of your tank - and we can give you a copy of all of them for free! And think about it - after you have taken some modest effort to read and learn all of them by heart, you'll be able to fix and even modify your tank all on your own! No more dependence on crooked car dealers! And if you need help, we have monthly community meetups you can attend and talk with people just as tank-crazy as you are! (please only attend if you're sufficiently tank-crazy, and PLEASE only after you read the manuals)"

(This was decades ago, the situation has gotten significantly better today)

> Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine)

I don't think that was the intended implication. I think the analogy is more akin to: "If send us a bug report, we'll fix it and ship a new version that you can download and use for free." In the olden days, you'd have to buy a new version of commercial software if it didn't work for your machine, complementary patches were rare.

"By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine"

Who would want that?

"Stay away from my house, you freak!" would be the normal reaction. Unless some serious trust is developed, I would not let people into my house while I sleep.

Also the actual usual reaction would have been more like: "hey it is open source, you can fix anything on your tank yourself"

You need a new module to connect with your other devices, just build it yourself, no big deal!

> Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point?

Ever wonder how Red Hat became a billion-dollar company before it was bought by IBM, and now makes up a huge segment of IBM's revenue stream?

Have you noticed SuSE is still around?

Have you ever speculated on how Canonical keeps its lights on?

Paid support, my naive friend. Linux support is big business and is what keeps the popular distros alive.

Good point!

Companies want that when prod stops.

I know you shouldn't look too closely at analogies, but I think there is an interesting inconsistency in the "car dealerships" story:

The tank people offer to send someone to look into the car (rsp. tank) but the buyer rejects them from entering their house.

That's significant, because a car is much less private than a house. In the real world, if my car had an issue, it would be perfectly reasonable to give it into the hands of a mechanic, even if I don't know them personally. (And evidently the reputation of the dealership isn't the deciding factor either, otherwise all the independent repair shops wouldn't exist)

On the other hand, I'd be much more wary to let strangers into my house without supervision, because I have far more private and valuable possessions there than in my car.

So the question is whether computers are more like cars or like houses. I'd argue, they sort of blur the line and have definitely moved closer to "house" in the last decades. But it might have been different back then.

Depends on where you lived. In the early days there were lots of LUGs in some areas, usually in college areas, but some would be hosted at a few Companies.

I think DEC had one or two. And you could find someone who would meet you somewhere to help you out, it was an exciting time. Also there were lots of install fests for Linux.

Most activity took place on USENET, so getting help was rather easy.

For example, I had asked how I could connect 2 monitors to my 386SX, one controlled by a VGA card, the other via a mono-card, each monitor with a couple of VTs. That was doable with Coherent on install. A day later I got a patch.

Things moved very quickly back then :)

I'd say the reputation of dealerships is why independent repair shops exist. :)

Obviously a computer is like an an RV.

It might also be a bus.

That nitpick over car/house analogies is rapidly breaking down as cars have increased compute and storage themselves, and integrate with other personal electronics, most especially "smart" phones.

Some recent discussion on the border phone search ruling:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41084384>

Reminded me of an extreme case. In 2012, the largest Russian bank brought its prod back online, and then posted literally this:

> We invite specialists to take part in a professional discussion to identify the causes of Oracle DBMS failure

> System logs and a more complete description of the situation will be posted in the blog. To participate in the discussion, you must fill out the registration form and wait for an invitation to your email.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120716225650/http://www.sbrf.r...

Arch Linux seems to be an exception.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux

> Arch developers remain unpaid, part-time volunteers, and there are no prospects for monetizing Arch Linux