In my last entry I complained about RedHat/JBoss Developer Studio IDE for not being free anymore. It was free in the beta, but in the final release it costs about 99 US$/year. And that made me thinking, what actually other IDEs cost. In a parallel project by a pharma group, I am using IBM Rational Software Architect as the main development environment. It’s nice actually, in many aspects better than RedHat/JBoss IDE, so I could already guess that IBM Rational is more expensive than JBoss, but I don’t think the price is hell out of JBoss’ league. Just see this screenshot from IBM’s website:

Got what I mean? It’s 7.048 Euro, about 10.308 US$. That means for a license of IBM Rational Software Architect, you could buy 100 years license for JBoss/RedHat Dev. Studio!

The question is, why it seems very hard for people (I mean corporates) spending 99 US$/year to buy RedHat/JBoss IDE, while no one complaining about the price of IBM’s Rational Software Architect? I think the answer is kind of habit. If you alredy using the RedHat stuff for free, and then suddenly you got to pay some money for it, you will find it is unacceptable, too expensive and so on. But if you already know and keep it in your back head that you have to pay for a stuff (such as IBM’s Rational), you will do it, regardless there are many alternatives outside and the price/benefits calculation. Especially if the company you’re doing projects already got experience with particular systems.

I never pay for my software since my company alway take care of the bills for me. Nevertheless, it has confirmed my view of Open-Source/Free-Software movement: Open-Source/Free Software has a lot of nice and tough software in any known areas, but the penetration in business environment is still low. Most of the systems in productive area are proprietary (indeed, IBM WebSphere, BEA Weblogic, SAP Application Server). I only seldom saw JBoss in productive. Open Source still needs a lot to do to improve their image in business environment.