You get what you pay for. (Score 1)

From a boss' point of view, it's simple. You pay for Enterprise. You don't for the free version. As they see it, you always get what you pay for. My shop just bought a dozen copies of ES. The software may be marginally more stable, but really you're paying (and paying, and paying... those are yearly support fees, NOT one-time purchase costs) for the time savings of the product. Why? Support, ease of maintenance thru Red Hat Network (a fabulous thing), and the ability to upgrade when _we_ want to, not when Red Hat cuts off the errata (incidentally timed to fall near the end of the school year, making it darn tough on us education folks). Also, the fact that the software and kernel get to mature a bit are a Good Thing. I'm not an idiot and am perfectly capable rolling our own software from source, but why waste my time on that and keeping up to date with all errata from the mailing lists when I can have Red Hat do it for me? There is a lot of man-hour savings in the support and red hat network components of Enterprise, which means I can spend my time working on my boss' pet projects. He gets stability, I get to keep my job. Sounds like it's worth something to me.