Hi,
I have propposed Kotlin to one of our clients for a large project. It will be used for both javascript target as well as jvm target.
The client wants to know if there is a commercial support available for Kotlin language.
Well… Kotlin comes out of Jetbrains (a commercial company) and many of the Kotlin developers are paid by Jetbrains. Bugs are managed through the Jetbrains bug tracker (for core Kotlin, not all extension libraries - they also use github). Google supports the use of Kotlin on Android. As Kotlin is open source it is also possible to pay anyone to help you if something doesn’t work as intended.
Having said that, you want to be a bit more specific. What support would they want to be available (what risks are they worried about). Is that customer going to be doing any development themselves or are they just worried that your solution will break in the future due to Kotlin becoming abandonware? Or maybe it is about the ability to update the code in the future. Or it may be training.
Of course Jetbrains may be able to provide paid support for Kotlin, but you’d have to ask Jetbrains (there is also a way to contact their sales on the jetbrains website).
Thanks for your suggestion, I will reach out to JetBrains sales team. I understand that asking for commercial support for Kotlin is a bit unusual or hard to understand. The clients I am dealing with have been long time oracle/ibm shops and they have strict policy that anything that runs in production must have commercial support. Basically newcomers to open-source world. Having said that, let me give two theoretical scenarios.
let us say they run in to a corner case where coroutines code when compiled to Jvm bytecode does not work as expected. or, kotlin.js library which is bridge between kotlin generated JS code and javascript runtime does not work as expected. For such cases they might need high-priority support.
I think there is no such thing as a commercial support for language. Language is not a product, but a specification. JetBrains definitely provides commercial support for tolls coming with language like IDEA itself.
The cases you describe are best covered not by language developers, but by some kind of consulting company.
This is a good and timely question, IMO.
IMHO.
I have worked for last 35+ years in server-side commercial aka mission-critical systems in large banks, energy and utilities and internet facing companies - who are not of a start-up mentality.
Most (all?) of them use either Java/JVM ecosystem with support from major vendors like Oracle (for Java or JVM bugs) or Microsoft .Net, with support from Microsoft.
If we, Kotlin fans, are to convince any of them to dump Java on the server-side in favour of Kotlin/JVM, we need a credible story to make them all warm-and-fuzzy.
The commercial JVM support for Kotlin/JVM would still come from someone like Oracle (or similar vendor i.e RedHat, IBM, etc).
However the Kotlin compiler and specific Kotlin libraries support plus any JVM interface related issues between Kotlin and JVM-bytecode needs to be very clearly articulated to conservative customers.
Otherwise you will never see many Kotlin/JVM running back-end mission critical apps in large commercial organizations.
Which would be a pity, I really think Kotlin is much better than Java or C#, for the server-side applications. It would be a pity if Kotlin did not repeat it’s Google/Android success on the server too.
2 Likes
Thanks yuribudilov, you explained it much better than I did. I have reached out to JetBrains sales team (with link to this thread). Will post update here if I hear back.
This looks like a big business opportunity for JetBrains! I’ve never thought of such scenarios although I’m very aware of the fact that big corps are happy to spend millions of dollars a year for support.
If someone wants to spend money, one should give him at least the chance to do so! 