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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Agreed. The vendor is not always the best support provider. For example, one of the reasons that microsoft is so successful in providing "support" is that they have so many "certified" solution providers. Commercial software houses that try to rely on microsoft for software dev support (in my experience) end up sorely disappointed. Being able to contract out the support/bug fixing in a bid process can bring better prices. There's not reason that a third party couldn't provide adequate development support for an open source product.
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!
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
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.