Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive? 718
An anonymous reader asks: "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." Why are commercial ports of OSS software so expensive, and what would need to happen before they could be competitive in the future?
Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, you want to sell a product that a community developed. Which means its quality could be variable. On top of that, you want to support it. The depends on excellent documentation which isn't enforced in the open source community. There's probably a lot of dead OSS projects for every one successful OSS project. You'll notice that the software itself is very very free
This particular user seems to be looking for portable technologies. The commercial versions of these technologies are still in their infancy which does not bode well for the OSS alternatives. I would suggest that you're paying the early adopter fees on a few of these things. Afterall, Google uses a stripped down version of Red Hat. My company of tens of thousands employees uses Red Hat company wide. They find the free cost to be quite lucrative--just buying support whenever it's needed.
The OSS business model works well for the individual user who isn't looking for support because the free end product is out there for them and they use it if it works. The enterprise consumers looking for support year after year must pay quite a bit.
The software itself is not expensive, nor is it necessarily harder to support--it's just very difficult to create this support out of nothing.
In my opinion, you're going about OSS all wrong. You should stick with what is working and slowly move to a new OSS tool one at a time. You will encounter learning curves. But there is a lot of information online and, worse comes to worse, you can look at the source/documentation yourself.
I imagine there's something about the product you aren't telling us about that is quite constraining
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
How is anything you just said unique to F/OSS? The quality of proprietary software is variable, and so is the support. The quality of documentation for proprietary software is likewise spotty. Proprietary software projects die on the vine all the time; at least F/OSS projects can be easily picked up again, if there is any interest.
As for the article's premise, that commercially supported F/OSS software is expensive - how is that any different than proprietary software? There's a reason that Paul Allen and Larry Ellison are in a boat building competition. I really with the Slashdot editors would spend a least an iota of energy attempting to filter out the trolls; but maybe they just enjoy the flamefests.
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Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless they're out of business. Or have discontinued the product. Or most of the development team has quit.
The difference between opensource and proprietary software is that with proprietary software only one company is legally allowed to fix any bugs.
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Informative)
As far as the other products he mentioned, they are buying commercial licenses without the usual "GPL only" restrictions as well as support. These are companies that will actually ANSWER your calls and fix problems you find, not just take your money and point you to a website. Remember, MS Visual studio, C#, CE tools may be cheap for price, but come with NO SUPPORT!!! NONE! if you want to actually call somebody, you have to pay per call/hour/service additional. The cost for most commercial products is only to legally USE them. not get help!
Perhaps this company didn't need quite so many support options, it seems a little silly to purchase the "deluxe" versions for such a small shop. But I'd give them credit for trying and helping out by paying!
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find surprising is that, in the few responses I've skimmed (including yours), I haven't seen anyone mention that these companies need to pay programmers. There's this tremendous myth that OSS is all written by good Samaritans in their spare time, and companies that sell it commercially simply rebrand it, box it, and ship it.
It's like people think that Linux is free, so why can't Redhat distribute it for almost nothing? Redhat and Novel employ programmers, too. In fact, the paid programmers make a tremendous contribution to all of this FOSS we benefit from. That's right, sometimes it's the big companies' work that makes the FOSS version so good, so the commercial companies aren't getting all that work for free.
I don't mean to insult anyone here, and I don't want to quibble about the ratio of good Samaritan contributions vs. paid contributions. Still, you can't discount that there are Redhat-employed programmers working on Redhat, and sometimes Redhat's work ends up in the free stuff.
So what I'm saying is, businesses selling commercial OSS have the same costs as a closed shop, even though they receive some free help. And for all the free help they get, these savings are offset by the fact that people don't have to buy their software. So let's say they cut their programming costs in 50% (just a number I'm plucking out of the air), their revenue is also cut by 75% (another made up number) by people who would buy it, but decided instead to download for free.
And this doesn't even take into account the whole dynamic of competition in commercial OSS. In short, for whatever Redhat spends in development, Novel also gets that work for free, and vice versa. Now maybe Novel doesn't want to use that work, and maybe Redhat is benefitting from Novel in just the same ways, but it sure does complicate the business model.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of people pay for software without specifically wanting support. First, you have consumers who don't really know how to pirate or get around activation schemes. Also, there are businesses for whom the cost of a license is cheaper than a visit from the BSA. Gosh, there are even people for whom paying for the software they use is a moral issue.
Redhat, on the other hand, has given moral and legal permission to use their software for free. I myself have purchased copies of Windows and Photoshop, but d
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Informative)
Not the kind of stuff this guy is talking about though. Personally I think the problem is he's comparing apples to oranges... I don't have numbers, and I'm not going to go get them, but let me point out a few of the obvious flaws in the summary IMO.
- RHE to WinXP OEM: Uh, no... Ubuntu to WinXP OEM, RHE to Win2k3 Server
- QT to MSVS2005: Why not go GTK+ vs. C# Express, both free
- Embedded Linux
... that's about volume, if you're embedding linux you should be saving a small fortune per appliance vs. putting WinCE on each of them, but yeah, the development aint cheap. - Cygwin commercial vs. Windows Unix tools, I think you're mis-understanding what each of those can do.
Right tool for the job, sometimes it's OSS, sometimes it's not... but the above post is like me complaining about the cost of steel vs. plastic because a caterpillar bulldozer is pricier than my nephew's sand bucket.Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:4, Interesting)
The RHE he was using for comparison was RHE WS, which is an apt comparison.
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Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Funny)
Enterprise support is availabe, but most of the time a qualified individual can search the KB articles just as fast the the dork on the other end of the phone in Microsoft.
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Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The Open Source Community is very forthcoming with help. No matter what problem you're having, you can rest assured that someone else has already had that very same problem before -- and solved it, and written about how they it. Google is your friend. Also, Linux at least is modular by design, which simplifies troubleshooting. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, knowing how to fix one problem on a Linux system may help you fix an apparently completely unrelated problem.
The reason why commercial licences for software also available under the GPL are so expensive, is to discourage you from buying them and make you choose the Open Source version instead. As long as you give back any improvements you make (or keep them secret, and keep your trap shut if/when someone else makes the same improvements and gives them away) you'll be fine. If you want to write closed-source software, you have to pay for it in money -- which can be used to fund the creation of Open Source alternatives to your own closed proprietary shite. By the same token, if you're too proud to search the Internet to find a solution to your problems, you can pay for it in money.
The Community generally wants to help. However, if you don't play by the rules of The Community, expect a big, fat "SCREW YOU!" Why should it be any other way?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Eivind.
Not necessarily correct (Score:3, Insightful)
If the product is mature and well developed, you might not need support. I'm working with Delphi (non-free!) in my job and cannot remember one case where we actually called Borland because of problems.
Most of the time, we find the necessary answers on the internet. But that is something F/OSS is good at too.
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
To my experience with commercial OSS solutions, commercial OSS with a project taken from the community is practically illicit competition. A company can live up with 2 or 3 integrators and sell software made by 10-20 people, manpower-wise. Sure they still have to pay for those 2 or 3 programmers, but it is way less than hiring, sustaining and training a whole staff.
That's why I call it a scam. Starting up a project to be commercial OSS it's a nightmare: you get almost no support by the community till you have something working, especially if you aren't endorsed by one of the well-known OSS VIP who seems to be the only one that can say "I opened a new OSS project to improve my salary and climb the industry ladder" and get people working without salary for them. You are stuck with the same expenses and problems of closed source management, with the added value that a competitor can start integrate your solution once it works and make it better with 10-20% the money you invested in the project, assuming you are able to make it even with all the expenses to win the inertia of starting a business. Sure, given the time patches will start to come in (especially from early adopters, not necessarily by the extended community) but it too much risky to make it commercial open source from the start if you plan to start from scratch. Most of the successful OSS commercial solutions started up from hobby project or are simply integrations of other people work, they are not fair when they define themselves successful commercial enterprises, since they didn't deal with the startup costs and started with something of value by itself.
In addition, for enterprise grade software, OSS makes no difference over proprietary solutions. I now work on a small corporation based on 7 different nations and everywhere, while the platforms used vary from full OSS (my preference) to totally Closed Source, the customer gets always the sources on software developed with full control over it. The added value of OSS for them is on the infrastructure (no money spent on anything is not strictly the software), not on the project itself. Wonder why corporations are moving to SOA? That's the reason, no more clients getting the source code to turn on the less paying maintainer, since they are getting only the services.
Aside several enterprise projects, most of the OSS software reside in the realm of user-oriented utilities. Here, aside for being free, there's still too small interest on the source for the end users. I usually say to our managers that aside to fork a project to add a sterling point on your CV, nobody cares about sources on OSS software for personal use, since the selling points of these applications are cost (the less the better) and functionalities (the more the better). Sure OSS ensures these small projects will be alive even if original devs abandon it, but here more than anywhere its almost impossible to make money: if you want to get paid a bozo can start forking a free version again. If you get commercial someone can still relieve your software and make it better with less hassle, outselling you. There are a lot of commercial implementations of OSS software that are so much polished and user-captivating that outshadow community driven ones, most of them are on dog eat dog mode, continously cannibalizing other competitors in functionalities and sparky features (take a look at the jabber clients). So, if you are the one developing the software AND you are also in need to improve it to remain competitive, you are pretty much rising your internal costs and are more likely to be outsold by competitors that only integrates waiting on the road for code to come. Improvements have less impact than new features, but they are still costly. Planning new versions of your software while improving your current one to remain commercially competitive, if you aren't backed by a license that allows you to ask money from competition, pretty much kills you, otherwise your project will start to stagnate on itself (like many OSS do, to
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Freedom. (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope you're not just trolling...
What the hell is that supposed to even mean?! As far as I can tell, information is a pretty damn abstract concept, and it is people, if anything, that ever want something. Someone slaving away at the keyboard to make something work cannot be described as "information". It is called "labour".
First, to clarify it to anyone who may actually be misinformed enough to believe this nonesense, the whole idea behind the GPL is to undermine the concept of IP. Therefore, RH is most definately an exception to IP. While companies like Microsoft rely primarily on distribution sales (sometimes almost to the point of competing with themselves), RH is relying on providing customers with services (and they probably sell things too, but I don't feel like checking). So, no, this argument doesn't work, at all, without exception.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes for an interesting saying:
Information wants to be free
But the people who produce it want to eat
- Greg
"Information wants to be free" explained (Score:5, Insightful)
I trust when your physics teacher said, "Water seeks its own level," you got equally bent out of shape, pointing out that water doesn't "seek" anything.
Now the grandparent was indeed trolling. "Information wants to be free" isn't a moral justification for copyright infringement. Like "water seeks its own level," it's description, not prescription. It's a short reminder that information tends to be distributed. It's inherent to our nature as humans, we like sharing information. We invented speech, pictograms, writing, printing, telegraphs, telephones, film, television, fax machines, email, the web, and more because we love sharing information so much. All it takes for information to escape is for a single small leak. Once it's happened, you're done. To try and stop information from being free, we set up expensive technological measures like DRM and legal measures like confidentiality agreements and top secret clearance. And yet the information escapes.
"Information wants to be free" has gotten a bad rap because some idiots decided it mean that information should be free. No, it's just a description of human nature. Information is going to tend to be reproduce and distributed. For people who rely on suppressing the spread of information it's a reminder of what they're up against, just like someone building dams needs to keep in mind that water seeks its own level.
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Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Informative)
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The author is cherry picking and presenting half truths in order to try to make a point. It's a weasily thing really.
Anyway so QT costs a lot of money, why not use wxwindows, FOX, FLTK, or a dozen other perfectly fine open source toolkits.
So "one company" charges you a lot of money for real time linux
Why not GPL version? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not GPL version? (Score:5, Insightful)
The OP also seemed to be rolling all of support in the enterprise into the same support goal; like why waste money at all on vendor support for the dev workstations? That's ludicrous. You know they'll eventually need an IT person to maintain their windows workstations, even if microsoft is providing security patches. That person can do desktop support, and if they are competent, likely get better results faster than a commercial support vendor.
It sounds to me that the problem for this startup was more an issue of lack of leadership at the executive level with strong personal experience in open source embedded development. From the pricing, I'm pretty sure I know which RT linux vendor they went with, and if so, "reputable" was likely not evaluated from a developer standpoint. I would probably say that the "not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing" attitude is the problem. I'd rather a platform with *all* the code PLUS noncommercial support any day over code+commercial support, or (worse) just the support. It's making a big assumption that somehow the commercial product is going to come bug free and that support is going to snap a patch out to you by the end of the week (or sooner).
I would say a shop running less than 10 devs is probably not going to get that level of attention from a commercial vendor, but who knows? Maybe they will. I'm sure that the OP will come back in six months and tell us all about how csharp, visual studio, and windows ce saved the day. ROI! TCO! Rah rah rah!
Re:He required support (Score:5, Informative)
He says that QT costs too much so we goes to VS for around 700 dollars. Does that 700 dollars include support? No it does not. He just threw that out because he is a troll. He is comparing the cost of QT + support to VS without support and picking a solution that only works on windows. C# + GTK is available for free from mono which he also completely ignores.
The guy decides to drop QT because it costs more and moves to C# without once considering java with swing or swt or anything else? He never considers Mono and goes directly to paying for VS while not buying support from MS.
The guy is either an idiot, shill, astro turfer or a troll.
Re:He required support (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, yes it does: [microsoft.com]
Also, while at $700 he wasn't talking about an MSDN subscription, were he to go with that instead the following would apply:
(Note that I can't be bothered to reconstruct the links)
So no, you don't get as much support (I assume - I actually don't know what TrollTech's support is like), but it's incorrect to say that you don't get any, even if you just buy VS.NET. (And any company serious about developing with/for MS products ought to buy at least one MSDN subscription, if only for the support...)
On top of that, community support resources for MS are at least as plentiful as those of the OSS community. Programmers working with MS tech are not fundamentally any different from those of us working with Java, or with OSS tools; we're all human, and most of us are more than happy to help out a fellow programmer in need from time to time.
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Agreed; to be comparable, one would have to add to the price of Windows the prices of a variety of goodies that come bundled with Linux. And if one intended to stay in business, one would also have to add in the prices of antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and other necessities that Windows needs to be operational.
But also the TFA is doing a lot of mixing of apples and oranges. Charges per seat for FOSS imply yearly support contracts, which makes sense, since by definition the license to the software itsel
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Informative)
That depends on the project. In OpenBSD, for example, you are not allowed to commit any code without also committing a corresponding update to the documentation (and your code must be commented according to the OpenBSD KNF guidelines; see man style for more information). Other projects have less strict commit rules.
Re:Not a Good Business Model for Enterprise (Score:5, Funny)
well, it's takes a lot of beer to get customers to buy free stuff.
Commercial versions vs. "based on" (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercial versions of OSS products aren't worth it, anywhere, almost ever. Just look at the prices above. In almost every case, go with the closed soruce version, and you'll save yourself a hell of a lot of money.
Now, look at two highly successful products built on open source: Fonality PBX (Asterisk) and Barracuda Spam firewall (Spamassassin). We use 'em both. I'm our entire IT department - just me. I already have too much on my plate, and when we were in the market for a new antispam solution, the natural pick was a Linux-Exim-Spamassassin/RBL frontend to our Exchange 2003 server. Powerful, effective, free (aside from hardware).
Problem: I'm already working tons of overtime - do we pay a contractor $120/hour to come in and try to set a system up, then rely on me to support it when I already don't have time? Or, do we pay a company like Barracuda Networks $1300 for their itty bitty model of the spam firewall and get a system that's guaranteed, backed up by all the time they've spent developing their hardware and frontends, 24/7 support, automatic updates, and license-free monitoring and filtering? I don't have the numbers with me, but the cost in staff + contractor time + hardware vs. the Barracuda system (which is overkill for our little network) was something like 3:1.
Re:Commercial versions vs. "based on" (Score:5, Interesting)
Need a domain server? I can take a spare box, install a base Fedora and bind in about 20 minutes. Or add bind to an underutilized server in about 2 minutes. MS just can't compare when it comes to small to mid size business servers. FOSS installs faster, has fewer issues when hardening, and in general is easier to secure, particularly when we are talking about using only one or two services. (block every damn port but 53 and move ssh to an unused high port and open that one up.)
On the desktop, however, it has been another issue. I can't even get my USB wireless ethernet cards to work in Linux, and there are virtually no apps for small to midsized businesses. Most of the solutions that I have looked at on Linux cost about 20 to 50 times more than similar products on Windows (yes, really 20 to 50 times more) so we can't AFFORD to move to "free" software on the desktop yet. I know this will change, but I was convinced 10 years ago that it would have changed within 10 years....
Re:Commercial versions vs. "based on" (Score:5, Interesting)
I run a small business... so let me answer your question, but I disagree with the grandparent, so I'll also include some answers, though he's right that there are big gaps.
- Accounting: GnuCash is good, I can't use it because my accountant doesn't support it.
- Some kind of basic organization ala MS Project... dunno personally, but MSProject sucks too.
- Visio equivalent... dunno
- Defect tracking: Bugzilla
- Source Control: SVN Obliterates some of the 6 figure competitors IMHO
- Email: Thunderbird
- Contact management: Yes, we have choices, but the propertiary ones are better IMHO
- Inventory: Dunno, can't say the commercial ones are any good either, guess that's why I'm writing one right now
- Scheduler... sorry Sunbird & the like aren't up to part yet... still gotta give Evolution an install, but I'm busy
- Backup solutions: OSS is way ahead of the commercial ones here IMHO
- Databases: PostgreSQL is a winner for me
- An OS that supports my eight monitor setup easily, stuck on windows
- Remoting software: Putty is the best CLI one I've ever seen, TightVNC is good for most of my stuff, but I prefer to use RemoteDesktop when appropriate (when I can lock the screen.. yes I know rdesktop is great, not a server tho)
- Internal chat network: OSS slaughters propertiary
List goes on and on I imagine, every small business needs something a little different, that's why the economy loves us so much, we put a huge percentage of our income back into operating costs. But, as you might have determined from my disjointed comments, my customers love me because I employ the best tool for the job philosophy... I ask two questions, and in this order: Can it do the job well? What's it cost? Often OSS is better, often it's not.Re:Commercial versions vs. "based on" (Score:5, Interesting)
We are not a technology company, we sell stuff. Our software needs are about inventory, manufacturing, distribution, wholesale, retail, ecommerce, and include 3 basic product catagories, 5 different price levels, 2 methods of sales, 3 locations, importing products from different countries, UPS, FedEx, LTL trucking, dedicated trucking, tracking, dropshipping, contract manufacturing, marketing, and a lot of other things that most companies with 15 people don't do. I have been here 13 years, and no one does it like us. Then again, most of the companies in my industry from 13 years ago are now out of business.
We are stuck in the middle and have unique needs, which is why I have spent the last several years kludging stuff together with Perl and doing most things with my 2nd or 3rd choice of methods. We are not a traditional small business, but we are not a full blown enterprise, and there is a complete dirth of products available for companies like us, both on the WinTel platform, but particularly in the FOSS arena, because there are not many companies like us to write for.
We dont use schedulers or calenders, source control, chat networks, bug tracking, etc. Not every Slashdotter works for a tech company. Some of us sell the stuff you guys buy with your extra money. I dual boot linux and MS so I can game and get work done. On the server side, we have used Linux for many years (think RH 5.x), including samba, bind, apache, etc. but for the heavy apps, they just simply do not exist for mid sized companies. Yet.
Re:Commercial versions vs. "based on" (Score:4, Informative)
Or I can buy cheap Dell computers and about $1000 to $3000 worth of Sage/Peachtree products which suck but get the job done. I even have to pay more for Dell's without Windows. It was a most frustrating time, and no matter how much I wanted to migrate completely over to FOSS, it is pointless if it costs more and does less.
We still use Linux on all servers, and when the market has products that are cost effective and work for us, we will migrate, but it doesn't look like it will happen soon. I have talked to several people at companies that make software we DO like, and they say they will never port over to Linux. Ever.
Some Theories... (Score:4, Insightful)
Three reasons come to mind:
Of course, these are all hypothetical and general. YMMV.
Re:Some Theories... (Score:5, Interesting)
Which would mean that all software begins life as insanely expensive and then comes down in price? My experience sez that's not the case.
Quality and reliability
Yeah, I've never had to track down stupid issues in open source software. Never!
Support
Since the common wisdom seems to be that Microsoft charges a lot of money for nothing and it's super-easy to replace "propietary" software with FLOSS equivalents (MySQL vs. Oracle, GiMP vs. Photoshop, etc) I'd say that's about the only thing you could conceivably be charging for, other than packaging and/or integration. So I suppose the issue here is really "why are support contracts so expensive?" rather than "why is the software so expensive?".
Either way, my (relatively limited) experience with FLOSS vendors is that they tend to be a bit arrogant in the sense that they'll tell you that whatever you're using right now is "shit" and they have the solution to all of mankind's problems (including yours), and then they have absolutely no idea how to create things like tiered pricings and segment/volume discounts for different types of customers. That's something commercial software vendors do very well. The commercial ones will also tell you that they'll get you off the "shit", but then they can walk the walk. FLOSS vendors seem to be all talk.
In our case we ended up going without a support contract (insanely expensive) and hired a guy that was an expert with the software. He did all the customization work we needed for about a year and he made a good $50K with virtually guaranteed future contract work. The "vendor" (if one can call them that) ended up losing out to the hacker kid in mom's basement - literally.
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I submitted 3 Apache bugs (39940, 40146, and 40301) and they haven't even been assigned to anyone or commented on by anyone, never mind fixed!
Re:Some Theories... (Score:4, Insightful)
Granted, with closed source software, there are far fewer people capable of fixing it, but if you've paid for the software and it doesn't work, I feel like you should be able to demand that the manufacturer fix it. At least there should be some entitlement there, whereas with OSS, there is none.
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With OSS, I'm just screwed if I'm unable to fix it and no one else is willing to.
Have you tried identifying someone who has the knowledge to fix your issue, and offering them money to do it?
Re:Some Theories... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The crazy part about all of this is that the OS I'm using is BSD. The nic works great on Linux, but whoever ported it to BSD (Theo, I think?) either didn't do it right or somewhere along the way it got screwed up. Now bringing the interface down and back up makes the NIC worthless. Reboot is required to fix it.
I believe the original driver release was for Linux
Re:Some Theories... (Score:5, Informative)
If he did submit a bug and has an open case with Microsoft for it, it is free. Bugs, hotfixes and licensing cases are (and always have been) free.
Admittedly it's been a few years since I dealt much with MS software, but back around 2000 or so, I found some bugs in VC++ and it cost us $199 per incident to report them. I guess they called it "support" because an MS engineer looked at the problem for a while before deciding it was a bug, but it still seemed like paying money to report bugs to me.
Profit! (Score:3, Informative)
Hire people to make the software but not pay them = slavery
Charge more for the product than the wages you pay = PROFIT
Ok that was way too simple but the bottom line is no one ever said OSS was non-profit or even small profit. In fact by driving down costs these providers can get richer than with proprietary software. The model is buy low and sell high. Economics 101
Support (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, ya it does (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Patches. MS releases patches for Windows and everything associated with it, and tests those patches to make sure they work. If an incompatibility is found (it's rare one survives the initial testing) it gets fixed. Now of course there is OSS that does that, but there's no guarantee. With MS it's not really a question of if the software will be patched during it's supported life. Same deal with supported OSS software like RHEL. Sure, Fedora also does patches, but they aren't tested like the RHEL ones are, and if the developers of the component don't release a patch, they aren't likely to patch it for them.
2) The knowledge base. MS has a massive knowledge base that is really very good. I use it all the time at work. When a Windows system bluescreens do I start a debugger? Hell no, I'm not a programmer. I write down the details and look it up in the knowledge base. The answers tend to be just want I needed. If some weird problems comes up, again I go looking in the knowledge base. It is a central, easy to search, repository of solutions tested by MS themselves. You don't get that with a no-charge OSS product. Sure there are news group posts, and IRC logs and such out there but man, tracking down the answer can be hell, if anyone has found an answer at all.
3) Vendor support. When a vendor sells you a system with Windows, they are guaranteeing hardware support (at least if they aren't shady). When Gateway sells me a rackmount server with Windows installed, I know that it will be working, and I know that it will have drivers for all it's hardware. However when I try and install FC4 on it, maybe it doesn't work. In fact what does happen is it kernel panics on install (we still have never figured out why). Should it not work, I can call them and get it fixed, if it's a Windows problem they'll call MS and get it fixed. You can get the same thing with Linux, but only buying a system with a supported Linux distro on it, which is usually an enterprise Linux.
Those are not at all worthless support resources. Support doesn't necessarily mean holding your hand through configuration, it just means ensuring that all the resources you need are available. You get that with commercial solutions, be they OSS based or not. It's not the same as a support contract, but often is what people need.
The same with OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Patches? Far faster than MicroSoft.
ESPECIALLY RedHat.
I am quite intimately aware of this particular fact.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget MSDN Re:Actually, ya it does (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of the MSDN support contract is unlimited newsgroup support in addition to formal support incidents. Meaning, that you can post to USENET, and Microsoft guarantees that someone will answer your question in (I think) 24 hours. Microsoft hires engineers and other folks to patrol for questions from MSDN subscribers, and the answers that they tend to give you are exceptional. I've received
Re:Actually, ya it does (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not joking and I'm not sure what you're smoking. Rarely, if ever, are production boxes patched with Microsoft patches without some due diligence. Best practices dictate patching test boxes first to see what the patches break before patching production boxes...because -- consistently -- Microsoft patches break existing software. I cannot stress this enough: Microsoft patches break shit all the time. Right now, I'm dealing with a situation where the latest 2003 service pack wreaks havoc on Terminal Services and causes some of the wierdest crap I've ever seen happen on a system (completely hosing opening shortcuts to URLs in IE [their own software, I might add])...and Microsoft's answer? "Uninstall that last service pack." Yeah, they test their patches to make sure they work, as in, they fix the bug they were patching. But they do a shit job of testing what the patches break.
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Support (Score:5, Informative)
The only way that they can charge more for the "commercial" version AND enforce their right to limit how you use the software is for them to build a completely proprietary project that runs on Linux, then they can license their complete, compiled (with or without source), and wholy owned product however they chose, but if they choose to license under the GPL then they cannot impose the use restrictions.
Nonsense.
Qt is licensed under two licenses: The GPL and Trolltech's commercial development license.
If you use the GPL version, which you acquire from wherever you like, then your application must also be licensed under the GPL, or you have no legal right to distributed it. Technically, you had no legal right to create it, except by accepting the terms of the GPL, because your application is a derived work and creation of derived works is reserved to the copyright holder.
If you buy the commercial license, you can sell your software as closed source, and you can redistribute the run-time files that Trolltech provides you, or that you build from the copy of the code that Trolltech provides you.
Code which was originally written under the GPL is not eligible for integration into a work under the commercial license. Not because Trolltech is adding requirements to the GPL, but because Trolltech's commercial license excludes such software from being linked to and distributed with their commercial version of Qt. You can't do it under the commercial license, and you obviously can't do it under the GPL.
There's no weird copyright theory here, just a couple of different licenses.
In practice, of course, lots of people start commercial Qt projects prior to purchasing development licenses. I've never heard of Trolltech making any attempt at all to curb this, beyond simply saying that it's not permitted.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Can we use the Open Source Edition while developing our non-opensource application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?
Answer:
No. Our commercial license agreements only apply to software that was developed with Qt under the commercial license agreement. They do not apply to code that was developed with the Qt Open Source Edition prior to the agreement. Any software developed with Qt without
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Other stupid Trolltech legal advice (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, that's right, they actually refer the GPL as "viral" and they're not trolling (pardon the irony). It's their FAQ, so fair enough that they're gunna try to encourage people to buy as many commercial licenses as possible, but this is just out and out lying.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's the support costs. (Score:5, Informative)
How much from Microsoft [microsoft.com] for your $140?
Win XP Pro OEm - support? (Score:5, Informative)
And the OEM version of Windows XP Pro is supported by whom?
I don't know what support Red Hat provides with the $299 version but I know supposrt is primarily what you're paying for or everyone would be using Fedora Core.. Please compare apples to apples - last I heard OEM versions including zero vendor support.
Much of your cost is because you are "commercial" (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to consider your business model - can your product be FOSS too, and then YOU charge the big bucks for support, etc.?
Pay for open source??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pay for open source??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tomcat, RedHat, Apache, etc.
However, there's a BIG difference between a webhosting-type services company that MIGHT promise 2 9's and a transaction processing company who promises 4 9's and where downtime costs/losses are measured in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
Any business where reliable systems are a critical component are going to be willing to pay for that reliability, be it in HA hardware solutions, HA software solutions, or more likely, a combination of the two.
Sometimes, you really don't have a choice - you need high end support because you need someone to blame when the shit hits the fan. You need someone who will dedicate development time to alter their product to meet your specific needs. Out of the box w/basic configuration? Sure, pay the least you can. Throw in semi-exotic hardware and the need to meet high-end reliability targets, and support costs are literally the least of your concerns.
It's not what you want. It's what you need to properly cover your ass and support the business.
I wouldn't want to work with you (Score:3, Insightful)
You obviously haven't worked for large environments that support 10s of thousands of internal customers before it even reaches the millions or billions of external customers. There is no way you could staff yet alone augment your knowledge base by hirring a bunch of know it alls. You need process, you need documentation, you ne
Why pay anything (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you want the $10,000 version of Cygwin when you can download and use it for free? Likewise, there are plenty of reputable free Linux distributions out there, many suitable for use in embedded systems.
If you want a commercial Linux, why not look at Redhat? Its comparable in price to Windows. There are plenty of embedded applications.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because they don't want to release their software as GPL, and the free version of cygwin requires it.
If you want a commercial Linux, why not look at Redhat?
Because they want a real-time embeddable OS and that's not what RH is selling.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Then they cannot use the GPL for the free version either, otherwise you could could just download the free version and use it commercially anyway and that would be perfectly legal under the GPL. This is why SleepyCat uses their own OSI and FSF approved license for BerkeleyDB, so that they can legally distinguish between the free version and the pay version while still maintainting control over end use an
Bandwidth don't come cheap... (Score:3, Funny)
Um... You're *not* paying for the software. (Score:5, Informative)
You're paying for official support and services. Presumably 24/7 telephone, onsite if necessary. You're paying for people and their expertise not software.
However, there is a good point. Support is expensive, there's a market out there for lower cost support services.
Broken Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
You can compare QT to GDI+ all you like, but GDI+ works on one platform, and QT works on many. Expect to pay more for an increased feature set. Law of the land, open versus closed never has and likely never will have any effect on that.
They already are. You can tell because Microsoft shills like yourself are pretending to have questions about them not being competitive on slashdot.
Apples to oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
You say you want official support. Then you proceed to compare an officially-supported copy of RedHat Enterprise Linux to an OEM copy of Windows XP. Well, I hate to break it to you, but that OEM copy of XP comes with no support. If you read the agreement, it says you as the system builder are responsible for supporting that copy once installed. You don't even get the installation support that comes with the $300 retail XP box. All you get is Windows Update, and the opportunity to hear the Microsoft rep tell you to call the company you bought your computer from. The same with Visual Studio. The commercial software isn't cheaper as far as support goes, they just aren't quoting you the real price until after you're committed.
The answer is in the question... (Score:4, Informative)
Simple solutions:
The same thing happened to me in my last job, a mixed Sun/Linux shop: people complaining about the price of Linux. Why? Because (a) only SuSE Linux was approved for a certain tool, and that tool was considered as critical by the company and (b) because company's policies and bean counters demanded official support from a reputable vendor for everything that was bought. The result? Thousands of Euros spent on buying expensive, gold-plated, 24/7 support contracts. That were almost never used, since both the programming and sysadmin teams had plenty of experience using Linux servers.
Which makes perfect sense really: Sun support is sometimes cheaper than some Linux vendors, because Sun understands that software support also means hardware lock-in. Microsoft can be cheaper than Linux because, let's face it, all the OEM Windows installed on brand-new computers subsidize the dev tools (C# and Visual what-have-you) while support is essential to the survival of many Linux distributions. Heck, giving the software away for free and selling support contracts is the entire business plan of many Linux distributors! Also, Microsoft understands that, if you, as a developer, buy Visual Thingamajig 2006, you are locked into their platforms, and so are your clients. And that means more money, in the long run, for Microsoft. Why do you think they have recently started to offer programming tools for free? Not out of the goodness of their hearts, that's for sure.
So, Linux, cheaper? Only if you solid in-house experience. I have also seen companies replacing hundreds of Sun and Windows 2000 R&D workstations by Linux/AMD machines. Why? The official reason was: "Linux is cheaper and good enough to provide the 90% functionalities we need, AMD is cheaper AND more powerful than SPARC CPUs, and everyone here likes (and knows) UNIX systems better anyway"... And that was the VP of R&D speaking.
So, back to the point above: Linux is cheaper... as long as you have enough experience in-house not to need expensive support contracts.
Apples vs Oranges (Score:5, Informative)
I think a big part of the problem is that you're comparing different things and wondering why they have different prices.
Qt vs C#: Sure, C# is cheaper, but the price you quoted for Qt is for triple-platform licenses, and C# doesn't get you that much cross-platform support. Yes, Mono gives you support for other platforms, but it differs in many respects from the Windows version, whereas Qt is very consistent across all of them. Documentation and support for Qt is vastly better than the comparable C# support for non-Windows environments, (and somewhat better than for Windows as well).
Red Hat vs XP: Red Hat contains far more functionality than XP. Depending on exactly what you're doing, you very likely have to buy additional software for XP. Also, how much support does that $140 XP license get you? Assistance with installation, and that's about it. Red Hat provides a lot more, and it costs a lot more. If you don't think you'll need the extra support, then don't buy it, and Red Hat will be a lot cheaper than XP.
RT Linux vs WinCE/VxWorks: I can't argue here, not at the prices you quoted, and since you said you got lousy support from the Linux vendor (who was it, BTW?). Perhaps you just needed a different vendor? How about Wind River (makers of VxWorks, for those who don't know).
Cygwin vs Windows Services for Unix: Depending on what you need, SFU may be fine. As long as you're just using the stuff provided by Microsoft, SFU is pretty good. If you want to be able to download any random Linux/Unix package off the net and have good odds that it will build and run, though, forget it, SFU is completely inadequate while Cygwin will do a good job. Note also that SFU comes with no support, unlike that commercial Cygwin.
In nearly all cases, I think the core issue is that the prices quoted for OSS support (a) buy you better support than what you'll get in the closed-source case, (b) give you more in functionality, flexibility, or both and (c) are really intended for bigger companies who are less strapped for cash and who have a bigger need of the security blanket the support contracts provide.
Your company would probably have been better off skipping the support contracts, using the software for no cost, and putting the cash aside to pay an independent consultant or two in case you get in a jam. You can get extremely high-quality support for most OSS for small consulting fees, just by hopping onto the project mailing list, identifying a handful of heavy contributors who know the area you're concerned with, and then privately offering them money for their time.
Of course, if your management is too uptight to take that approach, and too tight to buy the OSS support, you should go with the closed-source offerings -- and then keep your fingers crossed that you don't have to rely on Microsoft's support. Wind River's support is good, in my experience, but the rest of the stuff you mentioned is from Microsoft.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just to site an example (one I've said many times before).
A friend of mine was in a similar boat. Needed support contracts across the board for major software and licenses across the board for everything else. (ie, Winzip, office, etc).
Anyhow, so he picks up RedHat support and day one actually needs it.
Fairly quickly, the issue is resolved and they e-mail him a new binary and source for lilo to get his system to boot. (Newer chipset at the time). Later, the patch would be adde
This article is a troll (Score:4)
The article starts out with a ridiculous premise that you need a "license" to use open source products. Wrong. The only time you need a license is if you want to *distribute* them. So yes, if you are using QT in a proprietary product, you need to pay Trolltech for proprietary license, but you do not need to pay anyone to run Cygwin on your machine!
The second ridiculous premise is equating support contracts for open source products to OEM costs of proprietary software. Uhhm hello? The only thing you get with OEM proprietary software is installation support, and not a good one at that. For anything else, you have to pay per incident and expect to get this [bizwarcho.com] response.
Of all the products the AC listed, the only one you have to pay for is QT. Is it worth $3300 when you can get VS.net for $700? Well, QT is an excellent widget library that runs on Windows, OSX, and all flavours of Unix. How many platforms does C# run on? That's right, *one* (no, mono is not a viable alternative). How much money will this save you in the long run? Besides, there are alternatives to QT (GTK, Swing, etc.) so you can use something else if you don't want to pay.
So in summary, AC is comparing apples and oranges. Notice that he/she doesn't even ask for advice but simply states "we are not OSS shop anymore" as a matter of fact. What was the point of the article then? A rant by some AC who doesn't know what he is doing? Or a planted article by Microsoft shill? Hmmm....
Doesn't quite ring true (Score:3, Informative)
The only reason he'd have to pay $3300 / seat would be if he had more than $200,000 cash on hand. Not as available credit, but cash in the bank. Or if he was already bringing in more than $200,000 a year in revenue.
I don't have much sympathy for well-funded startups that decide to choose bad technology rather than good technology because it's a grand or two cheaper. I expect this one will burn through its VC and crash and burn fairly quickly.
You get what you pay for ... maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems this business decision was actually wrong for you. It might not be for many others, but it seems it was for you. Businesses that are in the business of doing something other than computer related work (for example, a law firm), such a decision to outsource all the support would usually be a good one. But in your case, I think that is not so. The behaviour of the core system is actually a critical element of your business model, and by outsourcing that, you will be paying premium.
Why not call a meeting together with both technical staff and business staff, and raise the issue of what you (your business) would have to charge if you (your business) were to offer support to other companies for the very thing you wanted to outsource. See if you can come up with a price. If that price is similar to what you've found in the market, then apparently you already understand why the price is that high. But if the pricing you come up with is significantly lower, then you have identified a new business model to expand into.
Support Contract vs Software License (Score:3, Informative)
One example you use is a comparison of RedHat Workstation for $299 versus Windows XP Professional for $140. That RedHat Workstation you're buying comes with a fairly nice support contract... According to the website [redhat.com] you get unlimited incidents and a 4 hour response time. That Windows price is just the license to use their software, no implied support contract at all...and Microsoft charges $245 per incident if you don't have a support contract...
A more accurate comparison of prices might be Fedora Core for $0 (just the license to use the software, no implied support contract) versus $140 for Windows XP Professional. Or Redhat Workstation for $299 (with unlimited support) versus $8,299 [microsoft.com] for "up to 10 hours of proactive support assistance" from Microsoft.
Software is cheap, support is expensive - and with OSS products you are generally buying support, since the software is usually available for free.
If they could just write a great debugger.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Really.. all the guys who cashed out and have a couple of years gentle work to spare on making a real debugger to go with a real kdevelop or (better still) anjuta for penguins can still make another million each out of that.. it's such a golden apple of a project still after all these years..
--
t o b e
No official support for chosen solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
Great. Good Idea.
"MSVS 2005 is ~$700... VxWorks or WinCE in our next product... An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140... Windows Unix services are free."
None of the above chosen solutions, at the prices cited, include "official support" None of them. I am an embedded developer and the one solution for which you don't cite a price, VxWorks or WinCE, will cost many thousands of dollars, per seat, if you want full, "official support."
From this I conclude that you were requiring full "official support" for OSS solutions but do not require "official support" for closed source solutions. Why are you surprised at the significant price difference in that case?
VxWorks??? (Score:3, Informative)
For our new project we are using buildroot, which is free. It will automatically download all the various tools and libraries, build the cross compiler and everything else.
If you need help setting this up, I suggest contacting one of the many consultants available to get you up and running. Once you're up and running, just go with a consultant when you're stuck. Our experience with a commercial embedded Linux vendor has been pretty bad with respect to support and I've heard similar complaints about other vendors as well.
Real reason - basic economics (Score:4, Insightful)
The supported product has a close substitute, in the form of an absolutely free (and Free/Open Source) but unsupported product. So the lower end user base, on the bottom portion of the demand curve, will generally opt for the free alternative. Hobbyist developers and shops building internal-use applications only, for example, will use the GPL version of Qt. Many of these users might have been buyers at 500 dollars if there were no free alternative, but with an essentially identical free alternative, the support, on the margin, isn't worth 500 dollars to them.
Thus if you price at 500 dollars you get a smaller portion of the market. To make things worse, adverse selection effects are likely, just like with individual health care plans - the people who pay for the supported product are actually paying because they want to USE the support! With many or most commercial software products, people buy the product but only use the support very occasionally or never. As a result, the cost of support *per copy sold* is much lower and margins are generally going to be higher for the commercial (non-OSS) software company.
I think this is why Red Hat ultimately dropped their lower priced products - they realized they shouldn't be trying to compete with their free products, and that too many sales of their "Enterprise" products were getting cannibalized by lower end paid, supported products. Even though they lost a large number of paying customers in this move, the people who actually need support are much more price-inelastic and are willing to pay the higher price for Enterprise support if the only other option is no support.
It's all about TCO, quality and your users. (Score:3, Interesting)
We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support
Is that cheaper closed source stuff is bug free or "supported"? I don't think so. The biggest benefit of free software is not having to worry about such costs. If you want to distribute non free software, you are back in the non free world and I'm not sure that's a viable place to be in any case. We can look at each of your issues, but it's impossible to go to far because we don't really know what your business model is or what you want to do other than have bug free software.
QT, $3,000 per seat vrs M$VC at $700. How many M$VC's can you get at no cost for free software distribution? Is the difference in price worth the platform you will have to force on your customers? No version of Windows has ever worked as well as any Linux distribution I've used.
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. Once again, why don't you just write free software and what do think your users will think of WinCE?
Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. But Debian costs nothing and I never run into bugs. Fedora and a host of others are also available at no cost, why would you ever pay $140 for a Windoze seat?
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. Ugh, why not just sell your customer a box that is *nix, like GE and other big equipment makers are doing? Once again, consider your user's experience and the cost of "supporting" all of their calls back to you when M$ does something else nasty to Unix Services.
The cheapest place to be is free. You are going to have "bugs" wherever you go but there are fewer in the free world and you might be able to fix them.
Comparing apples to pears (Score:3, Insightful)
Retail Windows XP Pro to a full-blown Workstation/Server Suite with e-mail and phone support. Try calling Microsoft with your Windows issue. You pay $55 for the initial call, they'll try to upsell you a support plan of course and then say that the issue is something to do with 3rd party software. You could compare SBS to RHWS please, pricing starts somewhere close to $1000 for 5 clients.
Next up QT compared to C#. Here you are comparing a multi-platform GUI-toolkit to a general programming framework. Compare GCC to C# or that IBM software for programming to Visual Studio. Also take in comparison the portability you get.
Cygwin to Unix services? Come on, you gotta be kidding me. They have nothing to do with each other.
I think you have poor product planning in your company and maybe someone with a MCP in your ordering department. Next to that, if you would open-source your software and share it, all those suites wouldn't cost you a dime. If you are a small company, your programmers should be capable enough of maintaining their own environment without support (it's been years since I called Microsoft, Apple, IBM's or RedHat's support line and we do have contracts with them) and if you're a bit bigger you might consider hiring a dedicated support guy. I have dealt with Dell and other companies before and before they handle your case and management gives permission for the guy to mess with the workstations/servers you will be 3 days out of production except if you give them half your paycheck.
This article looks more like a shameless plug for Microsoft FUD and a smart move by their marketing department towards their latest get-thee-f*cked campaign
The Questions Raises More Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're tiny and poor, eating ramen and paying no salaries for now, then you don't need professional support for anything. You're better off saving that money and learning the skills needed to do it yourself.
If you have at least one programmer on salary, the cost of tools, licenses, etc. is tiny compared to payroll. Are you seriously making a decision that affects your chance of success based on a few percent of your annual budget?
Are you saying that you wrote the app to QT before checking the price? Seems to be implied by this "rewrote":
(3300-700) * 5 = $13k. You completely ported your app to save $13k? This certainly tilts the balance towards "tiny and poor" and away from buying pricy "support". But how do you justify the choice of C#? Surely your 'behold' moment with QT taught you some caution?
There are many factors in choosing a GUI toolkit. Price per development seat is a fairly minor one. The first question is, on what platforms must the GUI run? You haven't told us. You mentioned embedded Linux - is the GUI going to be part of the embedded product? Or running on PC's talking to the embedded product?
If it's the former, do you realize that C#/Linux is a fairly risky path? Who will support you there? And how will you later hop to VxWorks, if needed?
If it's the latter, have you asked an experienced Windows programmer about the tradeoffs between
I think a startup needs experienced team members to succeed. There is not much time for learning new skills, and not much money for buying support. When you talk about randomly hopping from embedded Linux to VxWorks to WinCE, I do not get the sense of a seasoned embedded developer. Each of these OS's brings its own set of tradeoffs, its own nightmarish traps, and its own steep learning curve. I'm far from an embedded expert, but I've looked over the shoulders of experts enough to make that observation.
I think you need to work as a professional programmer for about 10 more years before you're ready for a startup.
XP OEM vs RHEL WS - support (Score:3, Insightful)
The real difference though is that Red Hat really do cost A LOT more for support, and you are FORCED to pay for that support year after year just to get bugfixes and security patches to the software you are using.
With XP, you pay per incident for support, and that can add up quite quickly with just a few support calls. But at least you are eligible for every single patch for the lifetime of the product.
With Red Hat, you pay for support for your first year and you get patches. But if you don't cough up in the second year, not only can't you phone in for support anymore (for all the good that's ever done me tbh), but more importantly you can't get patches any more. So the product you choose can lock you into annual fees to a vendor and if you don't pay them, your system is exposed. Not nice at all!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My employer is going RH (and possibly SuSE) and we're saving something like 7 figures in licensing and hardware support contracts by dumping the majority of our HP and Sun systems for bladeframes running RHEL.
Even with that, we're still paying a crapload, but the savings are immense when compared to RH's "real" competition. Personally, I suspect that RH would be nore than happy to lose what little of the workstation market that they have so they can rake in more money in server licenses...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:sounds like you don't really know what you need (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Like for example, the Qt libraries, which he /could/ download and use for free. /Until/ someone remembers this detail, long after they've gone live / IPO and purchased their commercial Qt license, and points to the FAQ that says "from day one, you must use a commercial license", and the GNU community, not to mention the Slashdot community, screams like their first child has just been stolen
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft Visual Studio costs $700. Doesn't matter if you open-source your code or if your license is "proprietary".
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think you can port any non-trivial Win32 application to Unix for under $1000 ?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but your comparison is ridiciluous.
Which means, if you have 5 developers using QT you already pay a similar amount. And now, what comes with MSDN Team Suite: Visual Studio, SQL Server, tools for software architecture, Business Solutions, all MS operating systems for different languages and more. You can absolutely not compare those two products. Even if you just take the MSDN Professional, which costs about 20