Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

Without going into a quarrel of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions for OSS, here's a good post to ponder on why commercial versions of Open Source software costs a bomb. In the end, some users prefer going back to Windows versions but then, they are not that great anyway. I know that Microsoft charges a bomb for certain rewrites of coding just to make your software work again.

In the end, OSS or just plain commercial Windows, there's no such thing as comparing costs anymore. Most importantly, which one gets your work running stable ? For me, its OSS since I've dabbled with both flavours and so far, they've had the best uptimes I've seen.

The post says :

"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.