Commercial Support: Security, Reliability and Peace of Mind

Decrease Go-To-Market Risk

As much as 95% of enterprises use open source software (OSS) for their mission critical applications1 but not all of them pay for support. Lack of support increases Go-To-Market (GTM) risk. Companies can’t get issues resolved in a timely manner nor reliably access the knowledge for a specific open source language build.

Few enterprises run commercial software in production without a support and maintenance contract in place. Why should OSS be treated differently? It shouldn’t. OSS, by definition, is neither vendor-backed nor vendor-supported and has no licensing costs. It’s essentially seen as “free” software. As a result, OSS is rarely allocated a line item in enterprise budgets. The lack of a formal budget item for OSS translates into security lapses, costly downtime, and disastrous loss of business reputation and market cap. Notable OSS examples include Sony Pictures, credit bureau Equifax, sportswear retailer Sports Direct, and many, many more.

Commercial Support

Commercial vendors have arisen to provide enterprise-grade support for OSS, and resolve growing concerns in security, stability, and reliability. Commercial open source vendors invest in testing, tuning and troubleshooting on a range of platforms and configurations before any new open source code is ever included in their subscription offerings. All of this requires a considerable investment in people, processes and systems. The commercial vendor’s investment assists enterprises to better manage risk in their production applications. The vendor generates the quality, efficiency, and performance required by enterprises.

In addition, commercial vendors can provide a defined roadmap for introducing new features and functionality. Roadmaps include new open source community packages, updates, patches and security fixes so you can plan your upgrades, migrations, and hardware refreshes.

Third Party vs Commercial Support

The open source community is a dedicated and enthusiastic supporter of their own work. However, community support doesn’t come with service level guarantee or a telephone support hotline. Further, community support happens via online forums. An open forum may not be the place you want to air your dirty laundry, particularly if you’re searching for a fix to a vulnerability in a production application.

Not all third-party vendors of commercial OSS support are created equal. Some are willing to only support certain types of OSS. Others are consultants who will actually sub-contract their commercial support. Look for commercial opensource vendors that contribute to, sponsor and productize open source projects. These vendors have intimate knowledge of the software, and are therefore typically in a better position to provide OSS support.

ActiveState – A Trusted Name in Open Source for 20 Years

ActiveState support entitles you to not only phone and email support, but also new versions of your preferred open source language. Versions are released on a quarterly basis and incorporate new packages, modules, and libraries curated from the open source community.
Protect the security of your legacy applications with extended support for Python 2 & Perl 5.16+.

All new code is rigorously vetted to ensure that:

• It comes with an active, supportive community.
• Licenses are non-GPL.
• Dependencies are resolved.
• Security vulnerabilities are patched.
• Urgent security issues are fixed on ad-hoc basis.

ActiveState’s precompiled open source language distributions are the key to meeting targets while decreasing your go-to-market risk. It’s why companies like Siemens, GE, IBM – in fact more than 97% of the Fortune 1000 – have chosen ActiveState.

What is the ActiveState Platform?

ActiveState is the de-facto standard for millions of developers around the world who have been using our commercially-backed, secure open source language distributions for over 20 years. With the ActiveState Platform, developers can now automatically build their own Python, Perl or Tcl Environments for Windows, Linux or Mac—all without requiring language or operating system expertise.

How to try the ActiveState Platform

You can try the ActiveState Platform by signing up for a free account using your email or GitHub credentials. Or sign up for a free demo and let us show you how we can support your Python 2 application(s).

Want to learn if ActiveState is a good fit for your organization? Schedule a consultation.