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Open Source: Pricing Varies Widely
Open Source licenses are either free or come at dirt cheap prices, right? Sometimes. Actually, Open Source commercial license prices are all over the board.
Mark de Visser had some interesting data on OS pricing recently on his blog. Mark tried to validate a widely held view that OS commercial software is typically priced at 10-20 percent the cost of a traditional license.
He cites Red Hat Linux as an outlier to that theory. Red Hat pegged prices at 20 percent higher than Windows servers licensing to convey an image of higher quality, credibility and value.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Compiere ERP which prices their software at $50 per user per year, which is somewhere around 1-2 percent of Oracle basic ERP pricing.
And somewhere in the middle is the Open Source Ingres database with a TCO over three years of $575,000 compared to $960,000 for SQL Server, $2.5 million for IBM DB2, and $3.7 million for Oracle DB.
Many companies with Open Source Commercial licenses don’t publish their pricing, so it’s hard to know how the pricing stacks up. But it’s clear that Open Source doesn’t always equate to free.
