Open Source: It Costs Too Much
Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to
spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official
support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the
price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now
behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and
rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a
reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3
seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go
for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An
OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license
will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large
shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we
have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us
then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE
or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore. [1]
Microsoft has been arguing the TCO part of the equation for a long time now. Are people finally starting to listen?
[1] http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/0452244