Antonio Gallardo wrote:
Hi:
I want to point out what really means Free Maillist Support.
At first sight when we said Cocoon has support trought free maillist, it
seems like it is less than Company Support. Many of us saw this as a lack
instead of a feature, just before we make the first taste of the Cocoon's
free support feature.
From my point of view Open support means:
<snip/>
I didn't have any specific replies because it's all good, so I'll add some more thoughts, slightly on the "Devil's Advocate" side of things.
When is commercial (or 'professional') support desired, compared to the "free" kind?
I'm sure the members of Orixo can answer this one :) It's a tough one though. The notion of professional support is relative, since many of us are not here as a result of our jobs (me, for instance). Sure, we're all professionals in one way or another, but I'll limit my definition to refer to people who are directly supporting Cocoon for money.
<snipped-very-true-comments/>
I have found several reasons that led our customers to ask for paid support (I prefer to say "paid" support as "professional" implies that cocoon-users is of lesser quality). You mentioned some of them already :
1/ They're not accustomed to using opensource software. They use it because it's both powerful and free, but are a bit frightened both by the fact that there's no "real" person they can ask to when they have a problem and by the information flood in the mailing-list (in clear text, they're not subsribed to cocoon-users).
2/ Project-related support. We do architecting, prototyping, guidance, evaluation and all that stuff that require some minimal knowlege of the project domain. And this can't be provided by cocoon-users.
3/ Training. Cocoon is a large beast with many features, and mastering it takes time. Training allows to greatly reduce the learning curve.
4/ Custom component development. Cocoon allows to build entire applications without writing a single line of Java. But sometimes a particular feature is needed, which requires to code new component and thus requires a deeper knowledge that what the customer doesn't want to invest in. Being a committer also allows the new component (if generic enough) to go back to Apache, thus relieving the customer of its maintainance.
The "knowledge hub" aspect is not something whose benefits are immediately perceived. But as most projects use other libraries as well (and Cocoon comes with a big load of jars), this quickly proves useful. Coming to us because we are Cocoon-geeks, customers quickly discover that we're also Ant-geeks, Tomcat-geeks, FOP-geeks, etc. This is what we call the "Cocoon galaxy".
As you can see, free support and paid support don't serve the same needs (except on point 1/) and are complementary.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects } Orixo, the opensource XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com
