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In my current role I have been asked to evaluate a number of various SOA Governance stacks. One stack in particular, WSO2, caught my eye as it appeared to be enterprise-ready, and it had an open-source feel. On the WSO2 website, stackoverflow is listed as the only community-support option. Most other open-source projects with active user and developer communities also have threaded discussion groups and IRC. However, because this site is listed as the only community support option, that is the only one I looked at.

In order to determine whether or not the community is responsive, I asked a fairly benign question. While the question has recieved an up-vote and has also been viewed a number of times, it has recieved no responses. Then, after looking at the questions submitted to stackoverflow with the WSO2 tag over the last month, I noticed the vast majority were not answered.

Because I am using community responsiveness as one factor in determining the best SOA Governance stack for use in my company, and because Stackoverflow is the only community-support option listed for the WSO2 stack, I feel it is appropriate to ask here about the WSO2 community responsiveness.

The question is: Have other folks been able to recently get questions answered on WSO2 integration (specifically surrounding thier Governance Registry offering)?

Bee
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Mike Van
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2 Answers2

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I've experience of other open source products with a big company behind and, in my experience, WSO2 community support is not yet as strong as others.

Is a pity since the product offering is really valid and powerful (I'm using it), but really complex.

As an overall experience to have an enterprise grade solution without support you need to procure really good skilled people in all the components that compose the WSO2 framework and be prepared to dedicate time on it (do not expect to put in place an eBay solution with the out of the box downloads, I think that there is a lot of fine tuning and precious configuration optimization that only who knows the tool can do).

As said on the previous post you trade money for time here as in many open source projects (maybe a bit more in this case, but we are talking of SOA platform so you can expect a bit of complexity around)

Luca Gioppo
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The community is a mix, and I am from WSO2, so I cannot answer your question direct. Users outside WSO2 need to anser this for real.

However, I can point to more community channels, in addition to StackOverfalow.

  1. Documentation: http://docs.wso2.org/wiki/dashboard.action
  2. Jira: https://wso2.org/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa

You can look into docs [1], report issues against docs, samples in Jira [2]. If none meets the expectations, then public channels like StackOverflow needs to be used. Those are about user community.

In open source, in addition to user community, there is also developer community aspect. For this we have mailing lists: Architecture: http://wso2.markmail.org/search/?q=#query:%20list%3Aorg.wso2.architecture+page:1+state:facets Development: http://wso2.markmail.org/search/?q=#query:%20list%3Aorg.wso2.dev+page:1+state:facets Using these channels, you can keep an eye on the developments and progress made on open source development.

In essense, open source community is not only about the part where users get help, it is also about developers collaborating openly. So user community is only half the story.

Also, the statement "Free and open source software business won’t work unless you serve both those who spend time to save money and those who spend money to save time" http://timreview.ca/article/385. So, yes, community support will come, when time permits. And as you can see from http://wso2.markmail.org/search/?q=#query:%20list%3Aorg.wso2.carbon-commits+page:1+state:facets the developer community is busy right now.

Samisa
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