Do you really believe that we would get any attention out of Sun if we were to r un into a problem with Java?

Well, I haven't done anything with Java, so I wouldn't be able to answer that. But I can answer some other questions.

• Have you gotten any help from HP when facing NIS problems at 5 am on a Sunday morning?

  Yes

• Have you gotten any help from Netapps when facing occasional crashes?

  Kernel patch was supplied within a week after submitting a core dump.

• Have you gotten any help from Sybase when facing database problems?

  On numerous accounts; many problems were fixed right away or I was called back within 4 hours by a specialist.

• Have you ever got any help from SUN?

  More often than I want to remember.

With Perl, we're not locked into a specific vendor for support, and the community from which we can get prompt attention is very large.

Perl 5.6.0 was released more than 2 years ago. Perl 5.6.1, its first and only maintainance release was more than a year later (and more than a year ago). Perl 5.8.0 will be here soon, but hasn't yet arrived yet.

Releases of open source software isn't always as speedy as we like to claim it is.

(And no, this should not be taken as a sneer into the direction of Jarkko, or p5p - not at all).

Abigail

Perl 5.6.0 was released more than 2 years ago. Perl 5.6.1, its first and only maintainance release was more than a year later (and more than a year ago). Perl 5.8.0 will be here soon, but hasn't yet arrived yet.

Releases of open source software isn't always as speedy as we like to claim it is.

Open Source has the luxury of releasing when it's ready, or at least readier than much commercial software. My experience with Open Source is mostly the Perl and Apache. With those, I haven't seen the need for frequent releases.

I've managed projects in the past that mixed Open Source software with commercial software, including a project that had 100KLOC of Perl. We built 5.6, and then 5.6.1 ourselves, from source. In the year and a half I was with that project, we had no problems with Perl that we couldn't solve easily ourselves, and no problems with Apache that required going out of house for support. It just worked. I can't say the same for IIS, or various incarnations of Microsoft database access libraries. It takes them lots of releases to shake bugs out.

I've been in many situations that required throwing "incident support" money at vendors within days of installing their products. We reported bugs to Microsoft that took months to fix, if that (the one that corrupted NT filesystems did get fairly prompt attention).

Open Source has the luxury of releasing when it's ready,

But OTOH, there is less of a drive to finish things. Don't get me wrong, there is some good open source software around. But there's a lot of crap around as well. There's a lot of bad commercial software, but there's also a lot of good commercial software. "Open Source" doesn't equal good just as "commercial software" doesn't equal bad.

A good support contract can be very valuable. I've had to deal with several vendors giving support. Some vendors were way better than others. Generalizing in the terms of "support contracts never work" isn't very useful.

If I'm in a position were I need to decide to use a product (hardware, software, language, toiletpaper, whatever), I certainly would let the possibility of getting support play a part in the decision. Things just aren't black and white.

Abigail