[ Thanks to Dave Rosenberg for this
link. ]
“There are two main reasons proprietary vendors are threatened
by open source alternatives: price compression and loss of market
share.“Open source companies have a pricing umbrella in relation to
proprietary vendors license fees. Proprietary vendors argue that
open source alternatives lack features, are less secure, socialist
and so on, but fundamentally the difference in features is likely
no more than 20%. Open source products are generally 10-30% of the
cost of the proprietary competitor. This means you can pay roughly
20% of the cost and receive roughly 80% of the features. This is a
very appealing proposition. And the more companies who take
advantage of this fact the more market share is lost by proprietary
vendors…”