[ehmuidifici]

A few years ago, I participated on a interview for a job (in a startup) which requires some skills in ASP.NET. When I started talking to company owner and I said to him that I knew PHP (and ASP.NET too, of course), he started to say that ASP.NET is better because it's paid, expensive and it has a great support from Microsoft... That's all he said about it. Later on, I discovered that almost 7/10 of big companies' IT managers think the same, that's why ASP.NET still has its audience. The same goes on with Oracle.

[untog]

They're not wrong, though. It's all about priorities. With an MS product you do get good support, and someone to shout at if something is not behaving as expected. With open source tech you can submit a patch to fix it yourself.

[Zak]

I've always been a little skeptical of the value of commercial support with proprietary development tools relative to community support with established, popular open source development tools. Is the average time between discovering a problem and identifying a good solution shorter? It would be hard to design a good study for this, but every programmer I've talked to with professional experience in both types of environment has told me that paid support was not an advantage for them.

[spongle]

You sometimes get good support. I've spent too much time on the phone to then (as a gold partner) and got sod all back on most occasions. If you're lucky you get a workaround but most of the time it's denial.

[hhandoko]

Which was exactly the sentiment of my manager in previous org: "You can use open source as long as they have commercial support".