I have been curious about this for a while. What exactly is meant by "production-ready" or its variants? Most recently I was looking for information about sqlite and found this thread, where many people suggest sqlite isn't ready for production.

I know the difference between development/testing and production; my definition of production is anything that is provided to the customer or will be used by non-programmers.

However, there seem to be many items that aren't defined as production-ready. But in reality, they may be perfectly suited and people just have a predujice against them, e.g. sqlite, python, non-MS products, etc.

Small office vs. enterprise? Single user vs. multi-user? Client vs. server? Where do you draw the line?