A computer is a turning machine, and people easily relate to procedure based programing at first. Object programing encapsulated procedures in side of objects methods for various good reasons. the concept of objects is just a little harder for students to grasp at first. once they have a decent handle on those then I'd introduce the concept of recursive programing, and then stack based programing. Once they had the basic concepts form these four approaches to programing then really start expanding their awareness of other types of programing models and exposure to many languages. On of the most educational classes I had in collage was comparative languages. In that class we solved the same 10 problems in 10 different programing languages. Really opened my mind to the fact that every problem is different and while there are approaches that allow the problem to be addressed in any given language, there were some problems that were obviously much simpler to some in some languages than in others. Any competent programmer today is a multi language programmer and picks up the next language quite easily and quickly. This is where the college would really excel at providing graduates that were really ready to enter industry as productive people. -jeff

Understand that all generalities have both counter arguments and some truth.

Look, the Support model for truly OSS is very competitive. If your not damn good people drop you quick, in closed source your the only game in town, or one of a very small and exclusive group. Some closed source support is excellent some is not. With OSS support if your not excellent you die very very quickly.

Why would he want an OSS CRM system anyway? maybe the system he is using is the best for his needs. maybe the cost model makes it worth while. Most of the OSS Projects that are active and long lived are truly excellent. Look at apache as an example.

None of the above addresses his issue. His issue was why would none of the support teams for this supposedly OSS program only commit to do projects for the non-OSS version.... to me that seems like a classic bait and switch type activity.

-jeff