An open "Dear United" letter

Dear United:

I'm afraid that we'll no longer be seeing each other regularly.   I've been seeing some new airlines, and they've made me realize what an abusive partner you've been.  You've taken me for granted, cheated and abused me, and I'm not putting up with it anymore.

I fly a lot for business.  As a result, I've had frequent flyer status on United/Star Alliance for years ... generally either Gold or Silver, depending on how many international trips I make.  The benefits and perks you gave me kept me coming back to you, even as you fell further and further behind technologically, and have been treating your customers with steadily declining courtesy.

This year, you stripped away all of my useful benefits as a Silver member.  I no longer get Economy Plus seats, free checked baggage, free upgrades, or really anything else which makes spending time with you less unpleasant.  I'm in the back of the plane with the proles, and you've made the back of the plane into a pretty nasty place. 

The new airlines I've been seeing (VirginAmerica, JetBlue, and Southwest), are all younger, hipper,  better looking, and have much better senses of humor than you.  More importantly, they appreciate me and treat me like a valued person.  Jetblue and Virgin have more leg room in coach, onboard entertainment systems, wireless internet, and decent quality food and booze on sale.  Southwest is plainer, but makes up for it by being "fast" (if you know what I mean), and checking my luggage for free.  All three of my new airlines' web sites are an entire generation of technology ahead of yours.

We've both known this was coming since you acquired Continental.  We knew that being bigger and fatter wasn't going to make you more sensitive to my needs.  You've treated me shabbily, and it's time to end it.

Sincerely,
A former Mileage Plus member

P.S.: I have a suggestion for a new United motto:

"We know you don't have a choice when you fly.  That's why you're on United."

How can we get software vendors to update?

Now that PostgreSQL is becoming the database of choice for independent software vendors, we're developing a new problem: software vendors do not apply updates.  Within the last month, we've had the exact same conversation with four different ISV customers we have:

Customer: we have an instance of data corruption on one of our client's machines.  detailed description follows

pgExperts: yes, that sounds like data corruption.  What version of PostgreSQL are you running on that machine?

Customer: 8.4.1.

pgExperts: 8.4.1 is missing 2 years of patch updates, including fixes for several data corruption issues.  You should have updated to 8.4.11. 

Customer: so can you fix it?

pgExperts: you need to apply the update to the current PostgreSQL patch version first.

Customer: we can't do that.  Can you fix it?

pgExperts: not for a reasonable cost, no.

It seems that many ISVs regularly deploy databases where they have neither mechanism nor regular practice of applying updates and patches.   This could be from a practice of avoiding bad patches (like those from certain major database and OS vendors), poor QA and testing, lack of remote access, inability to schedule downtimes, or some other issue.  The only strange thing is the level of resistance ISVs have to the idea of applying updates, as if they'd never heard of it before.  Regardless, the result is the same: the user's data is lost/corrupt/hacked, and PostgreSQL will be blamed.

I doubt we're the only middleware software provider to encounter this.  My question is, what can we do to educate vendors about the need to apply updates regularly, promptly, and throughout their customer base?