"I believe what will really determine the success or failure of commercial firms purchasing open source vendors is the extent to which they can keep the key developers," says Barry Strasnick, CIO at CitiStreet, a benefits management company in Quincy, Mass. "One of the main reasons that CitiStreet likes to deal with vendors such as JBoss is that our senior technical staff can deal with their technical staff, instead of having to deal with useless layers in between," he says. "We don't buy software because of fancy brochures or well-dressed sales staff. We buy software to gain benefit from great programmers."
