[ChuckMcM]

Interesting story.

So ghost has been around for a while, its a filesystem aware dump and restore utility. Its very useful and can do differential dumps. It no doubt needs relatively small amounts of development/support.

One might guess this would be like 'free' money for a company like Semantic. And yet they can't recover the cost of an automated email support system and a fractional engineer.

What does that say about their overhead as a software company? Google is (in)famous for 'support by peer group' types of things. Might work here.

So this is a way in which open source can 'win' in the Windows world as well I think as a way of lowering costs and getting the fractional engineer out of the volunteers that maintain it and the perhaps run the faq. I find those to be interesting business questions.

[weej]

It tells me that SYMANTEC is no longer making a decent enough profit margin to justify the operational and support systems expenses for the product.

Google's support by peer group plays towards online tools and web services. If you've every done ANY large client-side, windows based software development while trying to support aging versions of OS and application distributions it is no SMALL task.

[aperley]

Supporting newer OSes (UEFI secure boot, Win8, etc.) requires more than a small amount of development, hence the move to Symantec's product.