New to Earlang

[Ulf Wiger]

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Inswitch Solutions - Erlang Evaluation wrote:

>Support

>From your experience, should all the available
>documentation, examples, language references, etc.,
>together with this open source mailing list, be "enough"
>for a start up, or should I try to arrange some kind of
>commercial support?


In my experience, starting out with a course on Erlang and
OTP is a very good investment.

The Erlang language is quite easy to get into, and you'll be
writing exciting programs shortly after picking it up.
Still, you are likely to miss out on many of the goodies in
Erlang/OTP.

At last year's Erlang User Conference, a paper was presented
that discussed this very topic:

http://www.erlang-consulting.com/euc2001/euc2001.pdf


As far as the commercial support goes, I can only say that
the OTP team has been terriffic during the six years when
we've been a customer of theirs. They always (yes, always)
ship on time, and with amazing quality.

Open Source is... well, Open Source -- you will usually get
very quick and informed answers to your questions, and
someone may even fix a problem of yours simply because it's
(a) an interesting problem to solve, or (b) they have the
same problem. This happens surprisingly often.

However, chances are that you will stumble across some issue
that is important to you, but not to anyone else on the
list (I'm sure I could present a fairly long list of such
issues from our project...) When this happens, it surely
pays off to have a commercial support contract, and someone
that will take the time to fix it (and make sure that the
problem doesn't re-appear)

Both ordering a course and getting commercial support can
be regarded as insurance. In the end, it certainly depends
on whether you'll develop on a shoestring, or if you intend
to put some serious money on the line(*). My recommendation
is: go with both. You'll be spending your money wisely(**).

/Uffe

(*) Actually, I'll say this from experience, if you don't
have the money to go for commercial support, you should
probably think twice about going for designing a telecom
product.  ;-)

(**) Just to clarify: None of your money will end up in my
pockets, so this is pro-bono advice.

-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson Telecom AB, ATM Multiservice Networks