Free vs. pay versions (Re: Oracle Sues Google Over Android)

[richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org (Rich Braun)]

Jerry Feldman noted:
> In general, if a company wants a stable system, they either use one of
> the Enterprise class Linux systems or they use systems like CentOS.
> Certainly Fedora might be used in some commercial environments, but I
> would not see it as a competitor to RHEL.

Well, I think Novell's strategy bears some scrutiny here.  (I envisioned
Novell back in the '90s as one of those uber-proprietary companies packed with
more lawyers than software developers, but now there's a big difference.)

Ever since OpenSuSE 11.2 came out last November, I've been running a
production bake-off between RHEL 5.4/5.5 and OpenSuSE 11.2/11.3.

OpenSuSE is coming out the TCO winner by leaps & bounds. (TCO = total cost of
ownership.)

It's proving out one of my theories:  that as a technology becomes
sufficiently mature, stability improves to the point that the free version
provides reliability on par with the pay versions.

Companies like Novell and RHEL will now have to turn to a new selling point
besides "this is more stable" or "upgrades are required less often" or the
like to get folks like me to shell out the $$$ for pay versions.

The bandwagon these days seems to have trundled down the path of
virtualization.  For those of us with our own tools to manage hundreds of
machines, and applications which demand whole clusters of multi-core machines
that don't fit into the "put all your nodes onto one physical box" sales
pitch, those virtualization tools won't get me to buy.  But that's what I'm
guessing RH and Novell want to sell me in 2011.

-rich