Interchange Not Supported by Red Hat Anymore
Dave Aiello wrote, "For the past few business days, I have been investigating E-commerce Platforms for a client. My bias, particularly in this economy, is toward low cost, feature-ladened solutions. So, I am doing a lot of research into Open Source products."
"Red Hat acquired a small company in 2001 that had led the development of an Open Source E-commerce Platform now known as Interchange. Red Hat began offering Interchange as a product called Red Hat E-commerce Suite, and it was reviewed quite favorably in early 2002 by a number of magazines and websites, including ZDNet. So, I was surprised when I could not find much information about the product on www.redhat.com."
"Using Google, I located the key maintainers of the Interchange project at www.icdevgroup.com. There, I learned that Red Hat stopped offering Interchange as a product in June, although that has not affected the availability of the software."
"I wanted to point this out for a number of reasons. But, the main reason is that I want it to be easier for people who are researching Interchange to determine its status as a commercially-supported Open Source solution. It is not clear to me at the moment that any company is offering enterprise-level technical support for Interchange, but the community support that it has had for years is still there. As I do my first implementation of Interchange, I will try to report on the helpfulness of the Interchange support community."
Update, 12/05/2002: The Interchange Developer Group discussed the issue of Red Hat support for the project on their website on October 26. When this article was initially published, this was not apparent.