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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: What I21 and the printer vendors have in common
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What have I21 and companies (or better the printer divisions) like HP, Canon, Epson, etc. in common? Easy, all of them are doomed to one business model. I21 must sell support and services and the big printer vendors have to sell ink. Now Rod says that nobody can deliver the same quality of support than I21 when it comes to spring. This is equally false than the statement that no other ink delivers the same quality than the original vendors inks. Furthermore, even this is true and all others can only deliver 90% of the total quality possible, and here i mean “ink” and “spring support” quality, nobody really matters.
In major companies i work at, most support questions could more or less easily solved by spring experts outside of I21. Rod is right that ultimately only I21 can fix bugs and put it to whatever version control system they are using, but in practice, if any expert is fixing something and sends in a patch, chances are quite high that this piece of code gets in, untouched or not doesnt matter here. So the current discussion featured by TSS and highly visible inside the java community is far away from real life.
Lets take Linux for example. I have never seen a post where linus torvalds is argueing that companies that have no kernel developers cant delivers good linux support. I would go one step further with linux than in spring. With Linux i dont think that you will discover a lot of kernel bugs very soon. So all you have to provide is Linux expertise with the important areas for customers. Heck, customers dont ask for help with ext3, they ask for help in setting up a mailserver, creating a VoiP appliance with Asterisk and stuff like that.
I definitely think that people with high knowledge in Spring can support companies with their Spring development. If a company is unsure if 3rdPartySpringSupport Inc. can truely deliver, nobody hinders this company to get in touch with I21. And its somehow lame to argue the ethical way. Open Source is about competition on exactly the service&support field. Noone says that you have to contribute, nobody says that you need to have a support contract with the projects backing company. If you do contribute, thats fine, that makes you sleep better, but thats it.
Such a discussion is highly negative also for I21 btw. You dont get credibility by bashing competitors or by telling people that they cant deliver. But millions are changing everything right? I just dont believe that this discussion wouldnt be there without funding. Has anyone ever heard a discussion about companies providing geronimo support without having geronimo developers? I dont.
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