Why do they expect free support?

Posted July 11th, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

One of the reasons I stopped selling Linux on my Linux CD Mall website was because I got sick of people who seemed to expect support from me because they happened to have Linux (maybe from downloading it themselves, getting it from a friend or magazine cover etc) and I happened to sell it. Something about it being free seems to mean a lot of people seem to expect to get free suport or something...

My CD Mall website has been closed for a few weeks now, but I never removed my phone number from the contact page. Yesterday I got a call from this guy who had got some Fedora CDs from a visit to Ingram Micro. After he had installed it he was asked for a password so what did he do? He searched Google for contact redhat nz and found the Red Hat page on my site, clicked through to the contact page and then called me expecting me to come up with the solution to his problem.

Fortunately I'm a polite person and wasn't rude to him, but I told him I had no idea how to solve his problem. I suggested he search the Internet for an answer but he decided to try re-installing Fedora to see if that would solve the problem. From memory, Fedora at some stage asks you for a root password and to set up an initial user account during the install, so he must have entered a password somewhere.

Oh well... rant over. And I've removed my contact details from the contact page on that site hehe.