E-week has a writeup of Rod Johnsons talk at The ServerSide Symposium here. He talks about AOP, need for Standards and the death of in house frameworks. Some of them which he touched upon during the seminar I attended.
Towards the end a point is beeing made about how you should always look at the TCO when using open source. I completely agree, but it is also an extremely difficult judgement to make. If you have two competing frameworks, one commercial and one opensource, my experience says that the commercial should be pretty damn good to justify buting it and paying for support. First of all it costs money to buy, second it costs money for support and third it’s usually harder to find information when you run into problems.
If you buy support from a commercial vendor you will have guarantees about the support. But I’m not convinced you save much time or costs by this. Usually you spend most your time explaining your problem to some tech-person that asks you if you’ve updated Internet Explorer to the newest version. 😉 Beeing able to debug the source and asking questions on the often active forums usually takes a much shorter time than working through the support systems. Maybe I just havn’t seen an effective support organisation at work yet. 🙂