erlang license

[Matthias Lang]

Serge Aleynikov writes:
 > That's exactly what I did - after not hearing back from 
 > sales@REDACTED (I made three attempts in the past two months) 
 > I send another email (that failed) to the second contact.  :-(

Wildly offtopic, but this reminds me of "desperately seeking tkaurich".

We use c6xxx DSPs from Texas Instruments. Interesting DSPs, they
execute 8 instructions in parallel for each clock and _all_ the
problems of making sure that results are ready in time for following
instructions are left to the C compiler---like RISC taken a step
further. Compiler bugs, i.e. incorrect object code, are not
infrequent, but the excellent bang/buck and bang/W make them a winner anyway.

In spite of paying a hefty per-seat fee for the compiler _and_ 
paying (note 1) a compulsory yearly support fee, support is poor. 
TI seem to spend the entire support budget on building ticketing 
systems designed to prevent my questions from reaching someone with a clue.

  Q: The compiler generates incorrect object code for this snippet of 
     code. When can I have a fix?

  A: Have you considered diagnosing your problem with our 
     industry-leading graphical Visual Tuner Edition Debugger 
     Edition 2.0++?

(the above example may be slightly exaggerated to improve clarity...)

One day, I noticed that the linux (!) version of the compiler had a
username in the distribution tarfile---files were owned by
'tkaurich'. 30 seconds on google and I found a personal website for a
Tim Kaurich who works for TI, complete with pictures of his baby,
house, cat and dog. But no email address. I gave up.

The point? "professional" support systems, such as the maze of
automated reply systems and clunky erratas TI have, are often really
crap compared to ad-hoc support systems like 'erlang-questions'. But
we all knew that already, and I just used the mailing list to vent my
spleen.

Matthias

(footnote 1) if anyone from TI is reading this, I'm pretty sure I haven't
   paid for support for the past year or two. I've tried, but your system
   for accepting VISA card payments seems to lose my payments somewhere
   along the line and nobody ever chases it up. Actually, given
   that we buy DSPs for several orders of magnitude more than your 
   support fee, maybe you could consider just making the tools 
   and support free (as in beer).