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?

Comments

Realtime, Schmealtime

[viking80]

...Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000...

Before anyone spends money on "RT", carefully consider if you have a clue as to what you need.

Real time (RT) might be neccesary if you have a 4.77MHz processor and a huge strange operating system, and try to implement a soft modem. For most other applications it is not.

With a 2GHz processor it's no issue.

Example of "realtime" software running just fine on a Windows XP box

802.11b wifi stack with L2 and up in software! The interrupt handler triggered by the radio on packet receive has a max delay of about 800ns or 800. That's good enought.
It actually varies from a few ns to 800ns

Can you come up with a scenario where this variation is unacceptable?

Seems like XP is a pretty good RT OS.

Almost any Linux distro is a lot better (and controllable) than XP.