WebLogic, IBM, and Silverstream all offer source for a customer with a
reasonable requirement. One of the company's I worked with was able to get
the source commitment from all 3 vendors. I do think the customer and NDA
requirement for source is a viable one. Especially since Evermind seems to
be drafting friends/coworkers all the time. Heck, it certainly couldn't
hurt.
I wish this "interest" list operated in a similar fashion to the support
list for another product I use, Stalker's CommuniGate Pro. Even though
Stalker's a small company and I only spent $500 on their product, their
mailing list is tightly monitored and questions rarely go unanswered by
Stalker staff for longer than a few hours. While I'm sure working on Orion
is time-consuming, I can imagine just the PR worthiness of a monitored list
would be greatly beneficial. Personally, I think the Evermind guys
overestimate the value of features and underestimate the value of vendor
accessibility and involvement. The latter will frequently pays off in more
handsome ways than the former. I would certainly trade interim EJB v2
support, since it's not even final yet, for the active involvement of
Evermind staff in this list.
If JBoss ever becomes a competent product I fear for Orion.
--
Jason Rimmer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald Gutierrez" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Orion-Interest" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 10:55 PM
Subject: RE: Anyone using Orion in production? [long]
> At 05:36 PM 11/24/2000 -0800, you wrote:
> >You know..while I would love to see source for the sole purpose of
allowing
> >us to help the Orion team debug and fix problems (not to allow a fork of
the
> >product), I think everyone needs to think about other products. Do you
think
> >WebLogic, Inprise, Oracle, IBM and others are going to release their
source
> >so the committed followers can help them fix bugs. That would be
ideal..but
> >none of them do it. Thus far I don't know of any full J2EE ready app
servers
> >that have released their source. I have heard of JBoss..but I don't know
> >much about it.
>
> As far as I know, the "Orion Team" consists of very few people (I believe
> it's two), not 20 or 50 or 100 or more. Although Orion is cheap, if
> something goes wrong, I'm not certain I can expect rapid response. It's
> also a tough sell to the "business side".
>
> There is a community of people using the product. All are technically
> adept. If each person only fixed one bug in the life of the Orion
> server, it would be far superior than what it is now. Make people print
> out an NDA, sign it, and fax it back. Make them understand that the code
is
> proprietary. But by allowing people using the product to see the source,
it
> becomes that much better a product.
>
> For $1500, I'm actually not "glad" that it is cheap, I'm worried that
it'll
> be $1500 wasted when the crunch comes and Orion cannot deliver, and I have
> to pay for an alternative solution.
>
>
>
>
>
