The main question I believe with opensource and its use in mission critical systems is the ability to pass the buck. Who are you going to go after if your system is ran on opensource and it crashes in a blaze of glory. There are not many ISPs out there that would trust opensource to run their mission critical software. We wanted to include some opensource in our product but the ISP wanted it to then be a black box solution. We had to hide the fact that we used Tomcat and Apache from the ISP. Anyways another drawback is that generally (Apache not really included) opensource is a little behind the commercial software especially in the area of J2EE. My experience with Jboss was that we could not deploy on it because it did not offer a fully scalable solution with all the J2EE niceties (this was several months ago). Therefore we were forced to develop on OAS (Arg!).
One last opinion though, opensource does require more software know how and expertise. But the level of sophistication sometimes is exactly what is needed. No average Windows user can enter emacs or vi and be productive right away, but with a little perseverance those programs are powerful editors that can get the job done much better then commercial IDEs.
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The main question I believe with opensource and its use in mission critical systems is the ability to pass the buck. Who are you going to go after if your system is ran on opensource and it crashes in a blaze of glory. There are not many ISPs out there that would trust opensource to run their mission critical software. We wanted to include some opensource in our product but the ISP wanted it to then be a black box solution. We had to hide the fact that we used Tomcat and Apache from the ISP. Anyways another drawback is that generally (Apache not really included) opensource is a little behind the commercial software especially in the area of J2EE. My experience with Jboss was that we could not deploy on it because it did not offer a fully scalable solution with all the J2EE niceties (this was several months ago). Therefore we were forced to develop on OAS (Arg!). One last opinion though, opensource does require more software know how and expertise. But the level of sophistication sometimes is exactly what is needed. No average Windows user can enter emacs or vi and be productive right away, but with a little perseverance those programs are powerful editors that can get the job done much better then commercial IDEs.