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Do they have any paid consumer offerings, with consumer support?


I assume if you come with money, everything is possible. Also, you don't have to get support from the same company: There is no artificial monopoly in FLOSS unlike with proprietary software.


I could purchase the fully fledged OS X operating system as a consumer for $20, and get customer support for it. Now the OS is free with customer support.

> There is no artificial monopoly in FLOSS

I don't care about that as a consumer. I want software / a computer which works and easy customer support if I need it. People are very willing to pay for that, but there is no such FLOSS offering as far as I know. Because FLOSS developers hate consumers and worship corporate enterprises.


> I don't care about that as a consumer.

Until this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075. Or, worse, this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114 or this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556. Megacorps don't care about your requests for support.

> People are very willing to pay for that, but there is no such FLOSS offering as far as I know

https://www.debian.org/consultants/

https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/hardware/certified-h...

and much more. Have you tried using search?


This all seems like enterprise solutions. As a consumer, I shouldn't have to look at a list of consultants, as if I was trying to find support for a heavy industrial machine.

FLOSS or non-FLOSS, there is no real European consumer offering for an operating system. That should be the starting point for people who want a thriving European IT industry.

It could very well be based on Linux or whatever. But consumers need support. They need a phone numbers they can call and an e-mail addresses they can write to.

Focusing on consumers instead of corporate or academia is how Apple became so successful.



Very good example!




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