[juan_juarez]

> commercial ones that come with excellent support

Maybe I'm just too small-time for it to matter but what, exactly, does this commercial support actually buy you? In the last 10 years of programming, I've only run into a handful of bugs in my tools. When dealing with OSS projects, they were already known and fixed in newer versions. When dealing with $BIG_DATABASE_COMPANY they told me to use a workaround and didn't fix the bug until the next major release of the software.

I don't have a problem paying for commercial software, I understand it supports development and improvement of the tools, but what exactly are you getting when you spend (tens or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on licencing costs for support?

[pnathan]

Ideally, being able to call up the company and have the expectation that they will ship you a bugfix as soon as they can roll one together.

But that's pretty rare, IME/O.