In fact, how many companies do you know using open source for mission
critical systems that *don't* have some sort of extended support contract in
place?
I am one such company. One package of software I developed from scatch (and
still maintain) is developed entirely using open source software and I don't
pay for any support. It uses
JSF/MySQL/Hibernate/Quartz/iText/ApacheCommons/etc.
The software is mission critical to some customers and not to others (i.e.
if it goes down some would be out big time while others can delay processes
until it is back up) - it is not an ASP (Application Server Provider) type
application but instead installed on the intranet of each company that
purchases it.
I will say that there is one piece of software we used to have in the stack
that we paid support for, but it broke so much that we rewrote it
ourselves. What does this tell me? *Sometimes* (and I would boldly say
many times) open source software is better than closed source if you have
the right personality to figure stuff out. More and more people are getting
the "right personality to figure stuff out" as open source continues.
On the flip side, there are some good reasons to not use PHP. Heck, PHP
won't even support UNICODE until PHP 6 is generally available. That's your
mission critical web application language?
I am not a huge PHP advocate (though I think it is by far the easiest to get
up and running with), but from the outside looking in I don't think Unicode
was at the top of any priority lists for many years just because nobody
needed it, and once it was a priority it was added. Makes sense to me.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
