You contact the vendor, which is a capitalistic enterprise and so will generally entertain your needs and either provide you with the support you need, at a price, or point you towards authorized alternative service providers.
I'm aware that this paradigm couldn't possibly work with the OSS production model, but there's no reason the community couldn't band together and come up with something better than "hire an engineer or go fuck yourself."
With a little bit of creative vision, I think the FOSS world could make a ton of money. But good luck herding those cats.
>> With a little bit of creative vision, I think the FOSS world could make a ton of money.
Notably, I have considered this, and as I was reading this thread, I was reminded of the BitCoin effort[1] by OpenWhisper Systems that appeared on HN not too long ago. The thing is, it's hard to get money-making models to work for "free (libre) software" in an era of increasing entitlement. That said, if there were another such system like that of the BitCoin one (but not using BitCoin or Paypal like everyone seems to resort to), I'd definitely be interested.
