An Architect's View

One of the nice aspects of the "Professional Open Source Sofware" business model is that you can be very flexible for your customers. The Railo server has a roadmap of core features and downloadable extensions - some free, some paid - but our roadmap can easily be influenced by our customers. Now that more developers are trying Railo every day, we're seeing more interest in certain features that were already on our roadmap but were either lower priority or scheduled some distance off in the future.The POSS model allows us to offer a variety of support and consulting services around the core free product, including the ability to custom develop new features or extensions and accelerate parts of the roadmap to suit those customers who need something specific sooner, rather than later. For example, if you have decided to port a large application to Railo but your code depends on a feature we don't yet support, you have the option to engage our professional services team to add that feature, ahead of the roadmap, so that you can be up and running faster. We like to refer to this as a customer "sponsoring" a feature or an extension. If you decided to sponsor an extension, what's in it for you? First off, you get the features you want, when you want them. Second, you can decide whether, when and how the extension would be made available for everyone else. You could allow us to make it available as soon as it is ready for you - or later based on our original roadmap. You could make it free or set a price for it - either way it would be available to all Railo users via the Extensions feature in the Server or Web Administrator. If it is a paid extension, you would share the revenue with Railo, helping to recoup the cost of the sponsorship. And finally, the extension information would feature a link and descriptive text about your business, right there in the Administrator. If you think this might help your business get better value out of Railo, feel free to contact the Railo team and discuss your needs!