>>I don't believe in free tools anymore. Too many times the free solutions were buggy, with no support and got outdated soon. That is fine if you are a >willing to cope with that or have a really tight budget, but as our company grew bigger, with more developers, we are well willing to pay for decent, well >working, well documented and supported paid alternatives. They tend to end up as cheaper solutions than the free ones, which take more time to >integrate and dealing with the headaches.

>Such a general statement I can't agree with - Is python buggy? Is Ruby buggy? Most of the open source stuff works very well. Linux is open source and works - I use it daily. So the general statement is just wrong.

I was talking about tools.. Not programming languages in specific. I guess my main point is that something free is not necessarily cheap. It all depends on your productivity with it. I'd rather have a productive tool / framework where I have to pay for, than a free tool where I first have to create a framework for the most trivial things.

Too many times I've wasted many hours to get something free working for me, while I could have bought something for $100 off the shelf, coded and tested.

Walter,