On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 21:27, Crispin Cowan wrote: > > > Basically agreed. But then lets look at the TCO picture: > > * Open source solution: > o capital: zero > o support contract: competing providers > * Proprietary solution: > o capital: $foo thousand dollars per seat > o support contract: whatever that one vendor wants to charge > you, bounded above by your cost of switching to a competing > product > > Of course, circumstances vary, and proprietary solutions may well turn > out to be the most cost effectve. But the above factors tend to favor > open source. Another concern comes to mind. How much do you want to take advantage of the _open_source_ nature of the product. If it's just going to come out of the cable, onto your drive, unzip, untar, configure, make, make install there isn't as much difference. But if you need the software to do something more or if you need to tweak it for your particular task the "open source" part can save you an awful lot of time and money depending on what sort of documentation is available and the state of the code tree. One of my first serious jobs involved doing some things with Cocoon and Tomcat that weren't supported. Since the source was available I was able to make it do what needed to be done. It would have been thousands and thousands of dollars to have a closed source commercial vendor do the same thing to a proprietary product.
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