Again you are dead right here as Novell and Red Hat both sell a subscription service with their product in the Open Source space, sold per desktop, per user etc. You cannot buy the commercial releases of their solutions without payment. Microsoft also have licensing schemes but like many they offer choice to minimise costs with does seem to negate your maximise sales discussion. For example a hospital has 15000 staff and 5000 devices who work in three shifts, In this scenario you pay per device not per staff member. An alternate is an IT company where each person mmay have a desktop, laptop and multiple devices, for example Microsoft where there are 55000 employees and > 150,000 devices. In this case you license by user. You are able to mix and match also with the different schemes.

You could say it is vendor lockin, you may be right but every organisation must do its due diligence when selecting its applications. The applications which meet its business needs will have choices for the platform they run on. The company must invest where it sees its best returns. They must do a cost analysis over the life of the application what it will cost to license, administer, support etc etc. If they do not then they are stupid and deserve to be plundered. No matter what they choose there is a cost for all choices, they just need to make wise business and commercial decisions that keep the business in front of others.

Hey I love this, as it finally recognises no matter whether open or closed source an application especially of significant effort costs significant money. It is not free to develop and maintain and the largest cost is peoples time. The difference is what happens to the applciation at the first hurdle (first version). Does the person or group need to recouperate its investment, do they want to own the IP, do they want to share it. If they work for “the man” then it is likely they receive compensation for their effort but the rights belong to “the man”.

Interestingly it all depends when it comes to closed source applciations and customer demand and directions. I can tell you Telstra was the largest MS Mail user in the southern hemisphere and they had significant input into the first version of Exchange and have done so for every release since. Microsoft absolutely takes notice when they request new features and changes etc during beta projects. Of course there is an outcome for Microsoft in that they can then sell the product to its customers.