Open Source or a commercial offering?

[Eberhard Roloff]

Karl Auer wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 22:06 -0500, Anthony M Simonelli wrote:
>> above.  That's $500 worth of work.  Now compared to a commercial
>> offering such as the SonicWall TZ 180 TotalSecure 10 priced at $480
>> that does all of the above, what is the benefit of running a free,
>> open source solution?
> 
> If it goes wrong, you can fix it. If you don't like the way it works,
> you can enhance it, improve it, extend it. There is no company to worry
> about going belly up. The effort you expended has resulted in in-house
> skills that are almost certainly applicable elsewhere, and are most
> certainly applicable to the care and feeding of this box. The box is
> perfectly matched to your needs, no compromises were necessary. You
> controlled the quality of the components.
> 
> Is that enough?
> 
I do not know. Surely these are good reasons.

 However, I surely know that with Linux you pay your debts with ellbow
grease instead of direct cash.

And I admit, I also have my doubts whether this is always worthwhile,
when economic value is of concern.

kind regards
Eberhard