First my thanks to Douwe Osinga <dmo@oberon.nl> for clearly expressing the position in favor of open source software.
I would never buy components without the source code. In my >experience support for commercial components is rather >irregular and not being able to debug or even fix problems in components you use can really damage your >product. Sending back the fixes is no more then logical, so >everybody profits. Having the source and sharing patches means >that you're already pretty close to full open source.
I agree with what he has to say. If I were a hard core software developer, I would prefer open source software, I can download it for free, get it to work, make any changes I need, and get support on a mailing list if I have a serious problem. In fact I would object to not having modifiable source code. But there is also another way to look at this problem. I believe that there is another target market that might prefer commercially supported components. Which could also include source. I am thinking of an end user market. More like an excel user than an object-oriented developer. These people would like to have an environment where they can drag and drop different components, and click on a few values to configure them. These end users want a clear catalogue of components, with a more detailed description of what each component does. They would like the components preinstalled on a server, they just select which ones they want to use. And they would need to pay for these components in order to support the marketting of these components, marketting investment which zope could benefit from. I have seen lots of object-oriented environments, and I believe that zope is the first technology that really enables a market in software components. I think that there is a real opportunity here. Are there any commercially sold software components for zope? Is anyone intersted in buying commercially supported zope components? Actually I am looking for a zope component to run the python and zope webring. Which is what started my thinking on these matters. Regards Chris 1-510-795-6086 lozinski@openstepnews.com lozinski@jobmart.com