Re: And so it continues...

"The Open Source community is great, but if you don't pay anything for your

software and you don't know how it works and you plug the pieces together
and cross your fingers, you're asking for this sort of situation."


Joe, I am not sure that OSS or not paying for it has anything to do with it. But I do agree that if you don't know how it works and you do plug everything together without knowledge, you can get into trouble pretty quickly. Doesn't make any difference if you are using open source technologies like JSP's, tag libs and Javascript, or using something like Visual Studio to build a .NET application. If you don't understand the technology, you will get into trouble.

I rely pretty heavily on Open Source technologies for a wide variety of things from running Tomcat and Apache as web/application servers to using Freemarker as a templating engine for servlets. They are stable, mature, well documented, well supported technologies that make my job easier and they are free. But, I have taken the time to learn them and over time, my use of them has improved. Just like WDSc or HATS: It took time to learn them but now I can use those tools more effectively.

I know you weren't slighting OSS. I think though, that the connection you establish between OSS and poor implementation is tenuous. Poorly implemented software is as big a problem in multi-million $$ installations as they are with OSS "free" installations. No stats on that, just my humble opinion.

Pete Helgren