If you want a single throat to choke, then purchase a support agreement from one of the five commercial ventures that supplies support for Axis. If you want a product that has more comprehensive tooling and documentation, then purchase a commercial product.
Open source software may not cost anything in terms of license fees, but as Jonathan Schwartz says, open source software is "free" as in "free puppy". There are plenty of other costs that go into the long-term care and feeding of open source.
Adopting an open source project should never be a light decision. It is a serious investment, and you should always spend time to properly assess the health and vitality of the open source project community before making that investment.
I would say that Axis has only just recently reached a maturity stage that I would recommend it to a novice OSS user -- the committer team was too small; the release cycles took too long; the documentation was spotty and incomplete; and no professional services were available. But the community has been revitalized during the last 6 months. The project is still going through a transition from Axis 1 to Axis 2, and this will cause some disruption to the project -- most of the dev team is working on Axis 2. If the situation is too disruptive for your tastes right now, I encourage you to take a break for a bit, but please come back in 6 months and check it out again.
Anne
On 10/28/05, A B <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Fair enough. I agree that the expertize on the open source side is superior and is probably better for more hardcore software deployments such as large networks/web sites, mission critical applications etc. etc. But for small to medium business apps it has been my experience that if you really need to get to the bottom of an issue it is better to have someone accountable who wants your business. You have the power to withhold payment or drop the vendor entirely if their support doesn't solve your issues.However I will concede and retract my statement about open source in general and re-direct specifically to axis.Cheers,Jeff.<snip>
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