“If commercial software companies are going to be
slashing prices, can’t I just continue using commercial products
instead of considering open source alternatives?“Bernard Golden: I expect commercial vendors to
begin treating the license fee as a loss leader. While the license
will be offered at a significant discount, the additional,
unbundled services–like support, training and so on–will continue
to be fully priced. Also licenses will undoubtedly be priced with a
huge number of options (e.g., number of processors, user processes,
types of clients and so on), so that the overall license fee will
still be quite expensive and difficult to understand…”