Hi Markus.
You and I exchanged emails on this general topic a week ago but others
may need additional background to understand your perspective on bug
fixing and support, so, trying to capture that in a couple of paragraphs...
Markus' context is that there are laws in Germany that require consumer
products to be free of defects. He interprets that to say that a
customer of a software product must be given free fixes for all
"critical" bugs in the product. Sun includes that in our commercial,
for-fee, GlassFish offering, but Markus says it should apply to the free
distribution also. Sun commits to push all commercial bug fixes to the
next free/public distribution, but the isolated, sustaining bug fixes
are not available _separately_ before that.
It is a bit more complicated than that, and IANAL, etc, but I think that
gives some background.
There is also a separate topic about what is a P1; I think that needs to
be addressed better.
From our perspective, much of this boils down to different ways to
balance the needs of Sun, who is contributing many people to deliver
GlassFish, with the needs of non-paying users, paying customers, and
developers and partners.
There are other ways of balancing things. RedHat, Covalent, MySQL,
JasperSoft, etc, etc, they all use different mechanisms to balance the
needs of all these stakeholders.
So far, I think most people in the GlassFish community have been happy
with the tradeoffs we have been following: we have been delivering free
good quality releases in a regular fashion, while building the next
generation v3 product and providing "support" to users and customers.
The last few months have been a bit extra tricky with summer, Oracle,
JavaOne, etc, but hopefully we are getting back to our normal cycles.
Hope this helps,
- eduard/o
Markus Karg wrote:
>> Do you have any idea what open source stands for?
>> I am a long time believer in open source. And I have nothing against
>> paying for support on open source products that actually show promise.
>
> I think nobody has a problem with paying good money for good support. But with GlassFish's P1 bugs it is different. Those bug reports have been investigated in long and expensive research by the users (they did not get money for that from Sun or anybody else), and it should be fair that those users get the bug fix for free, too. I do not see bug fixing as a "support".
>
> Regards
> Markus
>