Re: [libreplanet-discuss] How respond to a tech support technician that insists on needlessly installing proprietary software?

[Mary-Anne Wolf]

This won't be the response you want, but as someone who has worked in support:
The goal is to provide sufficiently good service to as many customers as 
possible
with as small and low paid a staff as possible.  Thus, requiring the staff to be
able to use a greater variety of software would cost more, because people with 
more skills are more expensive and because supporting more variations allows 
for 
a broader scope of possible situations and a larger number of possible problems 
to solve.  It is not about FLOSS, it is just about constraining the tasks.

In addition to what helps a specific customer, the standard software may do 
things
which are not obvious, such as searching an existing database for similar 
symptoms
or recording the interaction or pulling information about the configuration in
order to allow better diagnosis.

So, the time to discuss what set of software is used is when you are subscribing
to the support service.  The contract could specify what they provide to you.
Whether you have that choice depends on how that support came to be purchased.

Mary-Anne