One of the great things about free open source software (FOSS) is that you can use it without it costing you a penny and you can modify the software to suit your needs and, depending on the license, even bundle it as part of a commercial product you may develop.
Given the availability of such software, you might ask why anyone would pay for software? There are many reasons, foremost of which is usually to leverage the support of a corporation. The same logic applies to why people pay for maintenance and support, even on commercial products where they’ve already paid for the software license in the first place.
In the FOSS world, commercial maintenance and support is often still available through an organization that is associated with the free software. MySQL, for example, offers free software with paid support and consulting (typically around $2,500 / day). JBoss does the same, offering a variety of both support and consulting packages. This model is often called Professional Open Source and offers a way for companies to avoid upfront costs but still get all of the benefits of commercial software, by purchasing support and assistance as needed. We’ve already seen several well-known open source CFML projects adopt this model, a trend I would expect to continue as CFML projects become more sophisticated and more widely used.
As a JBoss project, Railo follows this model as well, which should be no surprise. The Railo team has recently reviewed and updated the information about our offerings in these areas:
- Support – offering four levels: silver, gold, platinum and enterprise.
- Consulting – covering everything from installation, configuration and performance tuning thru all aspects of application development and even assisting you with deployment to “the cloud”.
- Training – covering Railo itself as well as various frameworks and development processes and tools.
As the saying goes “We’ve got you covered!” so if there is anything we can help you with, Railo-specific or otherwise, feel free to contact us to discuss your needs.
