[Python-ideas] Making Python more enterprise technology

[Dj Gilcrease]

2010/5/9 Filip Gruszczyński <gruszczy at gmail.com>:
> In other words in your opinion Python needs a group of associated
> companies, that would provide additional support? Isn't that just a
> cool idea for a bussiness ;-)?

Yes, but since neither python nor django have corporate entities
behind them any company providing an SLA would be viewed as suspect by
"enterprise" companies. The SLAs would need to be directly with the
Python Software Foundation and the Django Foundation to be accepted as
those are the closest things to corporate entities behind the
software.

That is the other main reason Java & .Net are viewed as "Enterprise
Ready", they have a large corporation behind their development. So
there is someone with deep pockets for the "enterprise" company to sue
if they feel their SLA has been violated.


If you had not guessed the term "Enterprise Ready" is just laughable
to me. Any programing language that solves the problem with a minimum
amount of effort is "Enterprise Ready". For frameworks and tools to be
"Enterprise Ready" the only qualifications I need are, 1) It is not in
beta (does not need to be a 1.0+ release though) 2) Active development
is still on going 3) They have some form of support where I can ask
questions and find work arounds / fixes to issues I come across.

One company I worked for used the Remedy ticketing system over a free
open source system only because they could pay 200k/y and have a
support engineer on the phone within 4 hours of reporting a problem /
asking a question. What really dove the point home to me that the
"Enterprise Ready" stamp on the software was a joke was when I was
developing a front end to the Remedy SOAP interface I found a bug in
which a comment fields delimiters were sent as invalid XML. Spent 6
hours on the phone & remote desktop with their engineer who finally
admitted it was a bug, but told us "We wont fix that, you need to wait
a few months and buy our new "X.0" version which will have that
fixed". The new "X.0" version would cost an additional 50k to upgrade
to and an extra 30k/y for the SLA.


That isnt to say SLAs are all bad, but the marketing hype around the
term "Enterprise Ready" is. What the term means to me is "This
software should work, but if it doent do quite what you want tough
luck cause we only support it in xyz configuration. If it does not
work in xyz configuration feel free to call 800-dont-care and we will
listen to your issue and may provide a work around. If it is a real
bug thank you for reporting it, the fix will be in our next major
release that you can pay to upgrade to"