[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“Software pricing has always presented a conundrum both for
vendors and for the customer. In the pre-Internet days software
pricing on servers was, roughly, proportional to the cost of the
hardware. In the days of mainframes and minicomputers this seemed
rational, but as the servers morphed into anything from a lonely
Intel box to a high-end cluster it began to get complicated and it
was quite possible that, with expensive software such as the big
name database products, the structure of software pricing could
limit or determine hardware choice…”