Erik Hatcher's Blog

Open Source versus Commercial Software

After reading this blog, I was reminded of something I wanted to post last week. I came across a blog last week (I cannot remember where I found it - was it a java.net blog? or elsewhere? Post a link in the comments if you know which one I mean). The blog entry mentioned going to the CocoBase booth and asking them about how they compare to Hibernate and other technologies. So I tried it myself to see if I'd get the same results. The lady at the booth told me how bad open source was, how their support was better, and how I'd be in real trouble if I chose an open source O/R API. She's telling this to me - an Ant and XDoclet committer! Haha! So I had to let her have it a little and asked her to please tell me what features CocoBase had that were technically better than Hibernate. She said "you'll have to talk to one of our technical folks for that info". I left the booth shaking my head.

I'm sure most vendors are not this close minded, and I hope she does not represent her companies take on their product versus open-source. Her attitude certainly turned me off from digging into their product (and yes, we are actually actively shopping for new O/R solutions!). If your sales pitch is that open-source is bad, but you've got nothing better to offer, count me out.

Update: I Google'd up the blog entry I had seen last week and found it here. I've since gotten some interesting e-mail from THOUGHT, Inc. I've asked the person to post to this blog or allow me to paste the comments here. Watch this space!

Comments

• Is this any different...
  from a company providing a web-form with the header:
  "We see you are not using Internet Exploder, could you please fill out this form since it costs soo much more for us to support both netscape and IE".

  I was using Konqueror at the time...

  Point is that most companies are clueless, if you can't buy the stock; its not relevant.

  Posted by: zander on June 16, 2003 at 02:13 PM

• BEA seems to have "got the message"
  BEA came by and gave us a presentation on their new "Developers Workshop", an IDE and framework somewhat like what Rave is supposed to be.
  The good news is that they threw out their proprietary MVC framework, and based the new one on Struts.

  Posted by: johnreynolds on June 16, 2003 at 02:30 PM

• Some additional thoughts
  I think vendors that sell only a product are the ones that really have something to worry about with open-source and can become defensive about it. The real trick is to offer solutions and services that cannot be productized.

  Posted by: erikhatcher on June 16, 2003 at 03:25 PM

• Ward Mullins from THOUGHT, Inc on JDO
  http://www.theserverside.com//discussion/thread.jsp?thread_id=771#30204.

  Posted by: erikhatcher on June 19, 2003 at 06:24 AM

• Was it my blog you saw?
  http://www.porterhome.com/roller/page/matthew/20030610#cocobase_sales_reps_at_javaone

  Posted by: matthew on July 18, 2003 at 04:52 PM

• Ward Mullins from THOUGHT, Inc on JDO
  That link didn't work for me, but this one seems to.
  http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=771#30204

  Posted by: shadeltd on June 28, 2004 at 02:31 PM

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