Ethical? Its a perspective.

For us as customers, ethical would be if the company that produces Networker 
backup software (what ever its name) would share all known problems and 
their known workarounds and fixes as freely as possible.

We as admin's and as companies are talking about mission critical software 
,that we do pay a lot of money for, and that holds the core and crown jewels of 
our companies.

Sharing any known issues would alert backup admin's in advance of any issues 
(to use the prefeered term by managers) that would interfere with both our  
planning choices and with the security and reliability of both backups and 
restores of our essential data's.

I have no doubt that sharing known issues will give the producing company more 
time to handle newer and unknown issues that arise and deal with them 
more effectively. It would also promote open discussion of workarounds as on 
this list and give confidence to us current customers and potential new 
customers that the company producing this software so vital to our business 
continuity, will promote and participate openly in resolving issues and 
actively values any free discussion about their products.

Voices from a producing software company that holds its own values higher than 
those of the customers they serve with their software, would most likely 
argue that it is unethical to "resolve" issues more than once without gaining 
moneys from them. Issues one has to remind all participants involved that most 
likely stem from the software producing company and therefore are their 
responsability in the first place. We as customers and users of the software 
merely report bits and pieces of broken behaviour that we expected to be tested 
to work or be documented not to work.

It may be clear what my opinion on this matter is as I am a paying customer 
both in my current job and in my new job next month. It is my responsability 
to make sure that the data I schedule for backup is actually and reliably 
restorable without surprises and side effects. 

This is the essence of our jobs.

Maarten

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