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There are such open source projects, I can only recommend, stay away from them for commercial projects "that matter".
Many open source systems offer support licenses (open source does NOT mean "free to use" - don't forget that!) where you:
* Pay for the right to use it commercial
* Have a direct support line (<- who you're gonna call?)
* Get assistance even on code level if required
Teluu (pjsip) is a good example for that. This is a kind of open source that should be supported. Some anonymous garage projects are nothing I'd tinker with.
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After all these years I would add MOODLE to the list, the problem that it is the choice of the 3rd party... 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Usually if you agree to pay someone .. things can happen...else go for a commercial supported version if you are having a support
contract with your client.
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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It's actually not that much different than having some team in the company maintaining a proprietary closed-source API. Happens all the time where I work -- somebody else changes the API, and it breaks all the calls we're making to their service. There's no communication, no warning, no backwards compatibility, no versioning, nothing.
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Marc Clifton wrote: There's no communication
If it is in-house there is a lot of communication here - so it may happen only once... (we are small company)
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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So, the cat decides to throw up on the bed at 05:30 - fortunately, I managed to get him off while he was still "making the noises" so all I had to do was break out the carpet cleaning machine.
But ... there's no point in going back to bed, right?
Last night, the WookieTab was down to 8% power, so I left it plugged into the charger overnight. Unplug it, the screen lights up, and what do I see? "Getting windows ready, do not turn off your device". 
Why then, Microsoft? Did you actually wait until it was no longer on charge?
Yes, it looks like it did from the percentage it eventually came up with.
OK, updates are important - BUT GIVE US A CHANCE TO DECIDE WHEN TO INSTALL THEM! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Wow, it's not your day 
Don't go out, wear a helmet. Above all, be careful today!
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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05:30 is a good time for the cat to puke - Friday was 04:00, and Saturday 03:30
We've stopped the new medication (oral Ibuprofen gel) since vomiting is one of the "adverse condition" listed and will hope it calms down. Hopefully, the AB's the vet gave him should be pretty much finished their work, and he won't need the temperature lowering effect of NSAIDs any more anyway. I'll be keeping a close eye on him, and he has a vets appointment booked tomorrow morning if I need it anyway.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: oral Ibuprofen gel
cat cats take paracetamol?
It may cut down on the adverse reactions. (Does with many people.)
Of course ask the vet.
Installing Signature...
Do not switch off your computer.
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Not a good idea at all - cats are very sensitive to paracetamol toxicity, the fatal dose is a trivial amount even allowing for the much reduced body weight!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Oh, thanks, didn't know that. (Had heard aspirin bad for cats but not para - shouldv'e googled first.)
Installing Signature...
Do not switch off your computer.
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OriginalGriff wrote: OK, updates are important
This is one statement I have long taken issue with, particularly as a product becomes more mature it is 100% commonly accepted delusion.
OK for win 10 there may still be some merit or even requirement for updates but for Windows 7 has actually not needed an update applied since before 2015, yet the common misconception is that every update must be applied lest it collapse into a steaming virus ridden non-functional system. Yes my own and many client systems have run with windows updates turned of since as early as 2014. (A few selective updates may have been applied, but not many).
Even the recent 'huge security threats,' wannacry and the like, were never threats except in a few uncommon installations, (and really should have been corrected at the network level, not the operating system anyway.)
The main only issue holding me back from adopting win 10, and advising clients to do the same, is [because of the update process]; the inability to ensure the system I suggest/provide to a client is and will remain stable
- no matter who provides nobody wants even the chance of something that keeps breaking as much as win10
- I don't want to be saddled with more support calls for something I didn't cause or suggest.
Those of my clients that chose themselves to deploy to 10, I advise them I will not provide immediate response support for operating system [caused] issues, and will charge heavily for support provided to remediate such. (If they want to pay me $500 an hour to reinstall windows 10 at my own pace and timing then go ahead, I won't do it for any less, I prefer they find another geek if it comes to that.)
My final advice to clients remains: stay on 7 with this summary: why the hell change if the current system is not broken, and windows 10 cons aside for them there are no pros; zero advantage, yes ZERO to deploying 10. They absolutely don't need it, nothing is gained.
The interface, although ugly, doesn't matter.
The "fastest" at starting, stopping, running doesn't matter (a few seconds during boot, who cares
- and BTW: it's no longer true anyway
The 'privacy' is not really an issue for me nor clients
- of course set minimal: to cut wasted bandwidth, not to worry about stealing information
The app store is a joke but that doesn't matter, it's their company applications that matter.
Installing Signature...
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OriginalGriff wrote: BUT GIVE US A CHANCE TO DECIDE WHEN TO INSTALL THEM!
This is not configurable?
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In theory, yes - but it doesn't always play nice.
The "select a time" option is greyed out, and this particular update forced closed all apps, regardless of what they were doing at the time...
And doing it immediately you take it off charge is just plain rude! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I mentioned in a recent thread that I have a Windows 10 machine that failed to install this month's set of patches. It has very little reason to fail - Windows 10 1709, which came out in October, was clean installed barely a month ago, and I haven't installed any software on it other than the Nvidia ION driver it needs and VLC--it's in a very clean state. The machine is hooked up to a projector and is used only for watching videos - whether it's streaming from across my LAN (nothing is stored locally) or streaming from YouTube.
Why it fails to install an update when it's still in such a clean state, I don't know. However, this machine never managed to upgrade itself to Windows 10 1703, so it had been running 1607 since it came out. A few months ago, that started failing to install monthly updates, and knowing that it wasn't able to update to 1703 (without starting over), I waited patiently for 1709 to come out to do a clean install. The fact that it's now running into problems so soon after it's been wiped/reinstalled was the last straw for me. To be fair, I have Windows 10 running on at least half a dozen other machines, both physical and virtual, and none of those have tested my patience as much as this one has.
Last night I've had enough and installed Lubuntu 17.10 on it - it's rated as one of the better low-overhead distributions of Linux (that also has a decent desktop environment). The machine is old - it's an Acer Revo R3610, with some Atom CPU and 4GB of RAM. While it's good enough for its purpose (playing video), it did take Windows 10 some time to get going, especially after a cold boot, so I felt it was important to install a distribution that's not so resource-hungry. It performed better when it had Windows 7.
Long story short: I was impressed with how everything "just worked". I copied the ISO to a USB stick with Rufus (which makes it bootable), and was up and running within 20 minutes. It picked up both video and audio on its own, the NIC, and even the wireless adapter (which I don't really need). Out of the box, it sees the network share that contains my media library. There's some built-in app that plays AVI, MP4 and MKV files without a hitch, so I haven't even bothered installing VLC. There's a version of Kodi for Linux (which I hadn't reinstalled on Windows while it was running 1709), and it's indistinguishable from the Windows version - bonus, it performs much better than the Windows version ever did. The task manager (or whatever the equivalent is called) hasn't shown the OS using more than about 700MB of the 4GB of RAM.
If regular updates for this distribution are as problem-free on this physical machine as they are on the virtual machines I had been tinkering with, I think I'm going to manage to squeeze out more mileage from this machine than Windows was going to provide.
I guess my point, if I have one at all to make, is this: Microsoft, get your act together.
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dandy72 wrote: I guess my point, if I have one at all to make, is this: Microsoft, get your act together.
They have been working on it, but it's their act, not yours. Nor it's mine.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
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nads said this will be the last version of windows...
nobody thought he meant it that way.
RIP: yet another microsoft product.
(OK, not dead yet... they're doing the death by 1000 cuts.)
Installing Signature...
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I agree. I've had the same positive experiences with Ubuntu. My main machine is still Win10 however, since I'm so often do dev work and I'm so use windows after all these years.
ubuntu amazingly simple to install and just start using and everything including wifi just starts working properly on all types of old h/w too.
I have had a couple of things that are odd though. I get warnings to update then try too and it doesn't want to update. But overall, it's an amazing system and especially considering it is such a huge open source project.
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I use Fedora Linux quite a bit for various things, and honestly it is quite user friendly. I still use Windows for most things (as NVidia drivers for Linux suck), but Linux is on several other systems I own.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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The only Linux I ever tried was mint...
... and I was very surprised/pleased about:
a.) How easy it was to Setup
b.) How good W32 Software including an interbase SQL Server worked by the help of wine.
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We use Ubuntu at work, among other OSes. I find it less intuitive than Windows, but that may simply be lack of practice with it. (Most of my work is in the Windows environment.)
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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And there are a number of flavours of ubuntu, a very ight weight one, called xubuntu or some such, and one thats really like windows I believe. (Been a while since I played with it)
Anyway, yes, it is a good distro and for an engineer very easy to get to grips with. You can for example just switch out the entire kernel for another (you can build a kernel specific to your hardware for example) and back up the entire OS by just copying a directory.
Microisofts reaction with the OS is interesting. It is free, now called IoT (bundled up with the other two OSs, the old mobile and the phone one I seem to recall), and even the old NT version doesnt force you to run the exhaustive tests on your drivers before getting them signed.
I wonder if Microsoft are desperate and are trying to push their OS into places typically dominated by Linux? They are going to have to try a lot harder though, as you say. They really arent winning the race.
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dandy72 wrote: I guess my point, if I have one at all to make, is this: Microsoft, get your act together.
To be fair there are several parts and Microsoft only has control over one of them.
1. Machine
2. Operating system.
3. Your updates to hardware and software.
Prior to this point you were relying on Microsoft to make it effort free. And expecting that thousands or tens of thousands of different platforms would work of which yours is one.
Now it is entirely up to you to both make sure updates occur and that your machine continues to work. Certainly be easier if Microsoft could individually support your machine but not very cost effective. There is probably one or more services in your local area that would charge you for the same service so one can see what the cost actually is.
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You're not telling me anything I don't already know. I've been using Windows for nearly 30 years.
Updates generally work fine on most of my systems. They've also worked great on this one particular machine, in the past. But somewhere along the way, they've dropped the ball, and barely one month into a clean install, patches start failing again on the very first Patch Tuesday this instance of the OS has ever seen. They've done better, on this particular hardware combination, in the past - that's all I'm saying.
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