Hi,
Just wanted to add my $.02 worth to this interesting
discussion:
JBoss is free as in "free speech", not "free beer".
So if I want to sell JBoss CDs at US$10,000 a piece,
nobody can stop me. But I am also unable to stop
anybody doing price dumping by selling JBoss CDs
for only $1.
Same goes for support. I hope that Telkel already
does offer commercial support for JBoss, and that
they make a lot of money off it. My experience from
other opensource projects is that this is a Good
Thing: It makes the product more acceptable for
commercial use, and the support vendor gives valuable
contributions and bug reports back to the project.
We do not loose online support because somebody does
paid support. Nobody really has the power to stop
online support, and nobody really wants to.
Why?
Because the online support is also free as in "free
speech", not "free beer". Although nobody pays any
$$$ for the online support, there is a price for
this too: You have to formulate your questions, and
accept that your mail to the list is archived for
other people to see. So even if you just send a mail
to jboss-user asking "How do I do this?", you
contribute something back to the JBoss project.
Do not underestimate the value of the jboss-user
list to the JBoss project: This list is not just
valuable to users. Developers use it a lot to see
what is hard to understand and set up, and to find
out about bugs and other things that should be
changed. And lots of discussions on jboss-dev start
with a post to jboss-user. (You sometimes see this
when developers forget to redirect the discussion
to the right list.)
I don't think that the JBoss project could survive
without a free open online support list.
But I am also not the least bit frightened by paid
commercial support, as I have never seen this
killing an open online support list.
Best Regards,
Ole Husgaard.
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