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Why pay for MS hotfixes?

I happened to go through Chaz blog yesterday night. One of the post which made me think is "Why pay for MS hotfixes?".

Extract from chaz blog entry:

Okay, I don't want this to be an MS bashing session. But I ran into a problem where I believe a hotfix will resolve a problem I am having in a .Net 1.1 application. The problem is around a bug in certain kinds of serialization/deserialization in the .Net 1.1 framework SP1. The MS Knowledge Base article says there is a hotfix, but I have to go through support to obtain it. If MS knows there is a bug in the .Net framework and has a hotfix, then why do I have to pay $99 for e-mail support to obtain the fix?Is there a legitimate reason? Again I am not looking to bash Microsoft.

I feel he has a real valid point. May be I am missing something! So I am hoping to hear some (valid) response from Microsoft ppl on this.

Comments

Tejas said…
Interesting, I will see what Microsoftie's have to say about this.
Anonymous said…
You call local support, but you dont have to pay for getting a hotfix. A hotfix usually is a fix that has not been thru a full QA cycle and so is not available publicly. All hotfixs are free AFAIK.
Unknown said…
I believe hotfixes were available on MS Support site before so what changed suddenly in terms of testing the hotfixes? i have faced this issue too once before. My laptop has 2 GB and trying to hibernate gives and API errors. Digging deep, I found out that there is a hotfix, but the kb instead of providing the download asked to get it from support. This is most unusual.
Anonymous said…
The hotfixes released by MS are in bulletins and released every IInd tuesday of every month. These hotfixes are free and MS provide tools(MBSA, WUS, SUS etc.) to detect and install them. There are many other vendors who provide the automated enterprise solutions to scan and deploy these hotfixes. I am working on one such tool to deploy these patches.

Refer www.patchquest.com for more details. Also checkout http://secure.patchquest.com for the vulnerability database.

Nilam
Anonymous said…
Just to be clear... The hotfix may be free of charge, but I would have to pay $99 up front to contact support via e-mail. According to the KB article and confirmed by an MSDN concierge, the only way to obtain this hotfix is through support. This isn't a general release hotfix. It is only for the specific issue noted in the KB.
Anonymous said…
The $99 is refunded when they confirm that your problem is legitimate.

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