Note that open-source isn't always a shoo-in for the lowest cost solution.
For any significant software investment the total cost involves: initial purchase price; hardware; installation and (data) migration; integration with existing (or new) systems; ongoing support and maintenance; training and retraining.
In a lot of cases the latter dominate the initial cost.
Comments
Note that open-source isn't always a shoo-in for the lowest cost solution.
For any significant software investment the total cost involves: initial purchase price; hardware; installation and (data) migration; integration with existing (or new) systems; ongoing support and maintenance; training and retraining.
In a lot of cases the latter dominate the initial cost.
Open source is not the same gratis, so there is non reason to suspect it would be lowest cost for any non-appliance product.
But open source has a free market of maintenance industry, instead of a monopoly, which pushes prices down in general.