RFPs And Open Source Projects?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "My company is currently sending out RFPs to various real-time collaboration software vendors. One of the packages we would like to persue is Jabber (the open-source IM/chat software at www.jabber.org). However, for open source projects, where should the RFP be sent? For Jabber, we may use Jabber.com as our reference. But, as my company possibly pursues other open source alternatives, how do we answer this question?"

Comments

Who to ask to do the work

[Zachary Kessin]

Well there are two cases to consider.

1) Jabber does all of what you need. In that case just use it.

2) Jabber would need to be modified in some way to meet the needs of the project. In this case you probably want to have someone (Or several someones) working on these improvements full time and one should assume that one way or another you will have to pay them. If you want the Jabber crew to do it Send the RFP to the jabber developer's mailing list. If someone is interested then they will respond. Or just hire a few people to do the work in house. Of course you could just wait and hope that the folks working on jabber add the things you need. But I would recomend proactivly attempting to get them in there by paying somone to write (and *TEST*) the code.