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Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive?
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?
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
My work here is dung.
Let's draw an extremely fine line here: commercial parts/versions of OSS products, and products built on OSS.
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.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Three reasons come to mind:
Of course, these are all hypothetical and general. YMMV.
I don't see how RedHat is competing with 'Big Iron' when it doesn't have half the features. May be against lowend Solaris installs, but the price isn't that different.
While I think your second line is a good idea, your first misses the point - the submitter was comparing commercial OSS vs. CSS not commercial OSS vs. free OSS.
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You might want to consider your business model - can your product be FOSS too, and then YOU charge the big bucks for support, etc.?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Seems to me like you are searching out the most expensive commercial OSS on the planet, then asking why wouldn't you just buy the MS product instead.
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.
you act as if Qt were the only option around. What about GTK+ and wxWindows?
That's fine. Next time, pick a different vendor. How much research did you do before picking this vendor?
If you need support for every Linux desktop in your organization, you have bigger problems than how much you're paying for licensing. Also, that Windows XP Pro only comes with installation support. ALL support after installation is either hourly or on contract. So basically, instead of using white box linux so that you get a free redhat with free updates, you spent $140 to be locked into a Microsoft platform. How is this a win again?
I hate to break this to you, but "Windows Services for Unix" is crap. Also, you only need a license for cygwin if you want to distribute non-GPL software. Why go so balls-out for open source if you're not going to distribute open source? Your "do-good" ideas are half-assed and do not impress us under these circumstances.
Congratulations. Sounds to me like you wanted to use all the FoSS tools to create a non-Open product (let alone Free.) We don't need ya! Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, kthx.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
apples & oranges. You are dropping HW & SW support from HP/SUN and getting SW support only from RHEL. If you compare SW only support costs from Sun/RedHat/HP at equivilant support levels, they are fairly equivilant.
*full disclosure. I work for Sun Support, onsite at a large company that uses HP, RHEL, and Sun. I work with the folx who purchase support from all three vendors, and I'm going off of what they tell me, plus what I've seen elsewhere.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
In a past life working at a (still profitable) dot-com we didn't pay for support either.
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.
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.
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.
As said before there are a dozen OSS projects out there and when it comes to OS there's one thing you can't expect: reliability. Note that I'm not claiming that this is no where to be found, but you can't approach a project with "I demand...", etc. Got that part so far?
When looking Enterprise business this is exactly what is happening. Your customer is paying you and as such can't be told "We know you liked the product as it was but there were some bugs and so here's the new version. Unfortunatly it reacts a little bit different than the previous release." When your whole business is build upon such a product then this approach is not going to work. This would mean that OSS would be an absolute no no when it comes to Enterprise based computing. Which would be a shame IMO since there are some very good products out there, which over the years have already demonstrated that this doesn't have to be an issue perse. But the secret here?
Control. You will have to have someone (or a group) in control who are calling the shots, which also means that the person shouldn't be too afraid to simply cancel certain developments because of the reasons already mentioned above. However, in many cases companies fully rely on the OSS "market" by grabbing software together and neatly packaging it all up and when changes do happen they simply set their own staff to work to either "undo" those changes or merely port them back into their maintained version of the problem. That may look like OSS on the Enterprise, but its more like playing Enterprise-based business with an awfully weak and riskfull model. Resuling in what you experienced.
Finally, why I like Sun? Because they do things differently and don't pay much attention to the whiners ("it has to be FREE") but try to walk on that golden (middle) road to both please their customers and the developers. They simply came up with an already existing business model and started looking how OSS could fit into this. You see this happening right now with Solaris. People can build on Solaris all they want, fork it, whatever, but Sun keeps control over what does and doesn't get into the OS. Thus resulting in OSS developers who can make a difference while protecting their options to fully support the software they're releasing. I'm really surprised that RH or SuSE (now Novell) never seemed to use such an approach but more or less "winged" it, at least thats how it looks to me. You're basicly paying for support and some "insurance".
first, a startup/small company gets a 65% discount off $3300 or $1155.
And if some of the developers work on tools you plan to share source for that development station is free!
Thats pretty reasonable. Actually quite cheap.
M$ MDSN pricing is $10,939 for the MSDN team suite. That includes up to 5 developers.
Trying to develop anything with windows without this is just stupid.
If you add the test facility with another 30 computers for running tests etc,
M$ will be much more expensive.
I have tried both for actual products. In addition to much higher cost for M$, it is also alway a hassle with all the "Genuine advantage" crap. Reinstalling XP for testing various languages and new hardware configurations and having to call MS is just a huge hassle.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You can get plenty of OSS products for free, and then go to similar knowledge bases online for free support.
Patches? Far faster than MicroSoft.
ESPECIALLY RedHat.
I am quite intimately aware of this particular fact.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
After all this time there's still no OSS debugger that actually works even a tenth as well as the *other* one..
.no sig
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
"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-."
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?
You'll still need a $400-$700 copy of Visual Studio even with your $1000 Qt libraries. Qt looks even worse now...until you need your code to run on Solaris,Irix,OS X, and Linux. Then your investment is quickly recouped when you can develop on one platform and deploy on 4 or 5.
Do you think you can port any non-trivial Win32 application to Unix for under $1000 ?
Software systems are more complex than the components that they just run upon that it is usually cheaper to buy support than to staff up for every potential issue you may run across.
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 need vendor support and you need relationships you can depend upon so you can focus on running your business rather than pushing some OSS or even off the shelf product that your vendor should be doing for its own well being.
Business are here to make money.
If you are willing to hire the staff you need for in-house support, you may also be able to farm them out for other support jobs for all the people who have issues similar to yours. Now there's a potentially very profitable sideline for you.
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.
Because a key requirement was commercial support == you call someone to fix bugs for you, not fix them your self. I think the main problem was not shopping around for the required support.
Jesus, are you a simpleton or what? You can't dual license any code you developed against the GPL version of Qt. That means you must have a commercial license of Qt from the very first day you sat down to code your open source app. No-one starts an open source project with the knowledge that they are going to dual license the code when it is mature (usually 3 to 5 years after you start the project). Trolltech's licensing policy is designed to thwart people using the GPL version of their library to do proprietary development, but it, in effect, thwarts all dual licensing of open source software. Of course, this is an unintended consequence, but it comes about as a result of Trolltech choosing an insanely strange business model (charge the developer instead of the distributor) in an attempt to milk money out people earlier on in the development process.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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 code samples, compiled projects, analyses of logs, and many other kinds of help from the support folks. This assistance helps me to plan project timeframes a lot more accurately: you don't get "stuck."
Even purely as an educational and training thing, MSDN is worth the money, and I'll buy it as long as I'm in my current line of work.
Another atypical form of support that's extremely valuable is MSFT's relentless stream of conferences and training events, especially Tech Ed. Tech ed is insane: 5+ days of dawn-to-dusk training, and they end up putting the entirity of the conference on streamable audio/video DVDs. One of the Microsofties from the 2006 event in Boston told me that they flew close to a thousand employees out to Tech Ed to staff the booths, train, present, etc. Even at $1600/head for registration, they cannot be making money off of this sort of monster event. But that's not the point. Microsoft is able to train a lot of people quickly, and show attendees a bunch of stuff that might be useful to their problem spaces. Developers of modest talents get free reign to pick the brains of developers of exceptional talents, and a little of that rubs off. And that's how Microsoft wins.
Microsoft targets the needs of brilliant developers and it targets the needs of really mediocre developers and puts enough training out there in enough different forms that everyone is served. It has been a successful strategy, and IMHO deserves respect. Everyone wins.
The reason for the price point of commercial open source software packages is basic microeconomics, and has nothing to do with the better/worse quality of the software.
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.
Your comparing two entirely different products with each other:
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
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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.
Actually, yes it does:
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
If "free" doesn't come with a 24/7 support contract, it's not "free."
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
A lot of people here are commenting that with XP you don't get support, whereas with RHEL Workstation you do. This is true, to an extent.
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!
but I don't care about a big user base when these users are only leeching the software.
These so-called leeches will be running the software on a variety of different hardware and will encounter various problems and issues. At least some of them will report bugs, discuss issues on message boards and find and document (non-developer) solutions and work arounds, even if they never contribute any code or code fixes. Therefore these non-developer 'leeches' (like me) contribute to increasing the quality and usability of the software. They also contribute to the pressure on hardware suppliers to provide documentation and/or drivers (e.g. by only buying peripherals which they know will work with Linux).
Finally, at least a few of the 'leeches' will graduate to contributing code and code fixes eventually.
Incidently, you will find that real-life leeches are now used in modern medicine very effectively.
Posting as AC because slashdot blocks my entire IP range from signing on for unknown reasons.
Sorry the support offered for free for OSS products is pretty hopeless for businesses. If a company has lost 100's of hours of work due a bug or problem, they have the option of complaining the makers of commercial software. Ever tried complaining to the makers of a piece of OSS? "if you don't like it, make something better yourself" isn't an option for the vast majority of businesses (and inviduals too). Most community support for programs involves forums and messageboards, sometimes wikis. That's not an advantage of OSS, every popular piece of software has forums like these.
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-.
fine but you should understand that support is extra with most propietry software too.
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.
yeah trolltech (strangely fitting name don't you think) have set themselves up in a neat position to rape commercial software developers for linux, use a freeer toolkit like gtk. IIRC that $3300 does include the distribution though (unlike with MS where you will have to pay for a copy for every device you sell).
We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700).
and what if any support do you actually get at that price?
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year.
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops.
if you are shipping software based on cygwin you are a f*cking idiot anyway. Cygwin is barely tolerable in the controlled environment of your own boxes, once its on machines you don't control expect crashes caused by different apps shipping different versions of cygwin1.dll which don't play nice when loaded at the same time.
ultimately with any software if you wan't good support you will have to pay through the nose for it. The software itself (whether free or propietry) tends to be dirt cheap in comparison.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register