> The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully

> The poor optimization of operational costs (except for license fees) is a critical weakness in open source, and it is increasingly being attacked successfully. This is the developers perspective. In the time it takes to develop something the licence fees are indeed at tiny part of the cost. However, over the lifetime of the software itself it's usually a different outcome. Software typically lasts decades. Banks are still running cobol software written decades ago. Perhaps it's possible even over those long lifetimes the licensing costs still win. When it breaks down completely is when you deploy that software multiple times, paying those licence fees each time you do it. If you start paying for 1000 CAL's you have a problem. The other comment here that is a red flag to me is "all the tools that give you visibility into the database save you time". If it is development time then well and good, but if you are needing DBA's once the thing is deployed then just no. No matter how sophisticated those tools are, they still cost far more than needing no attention whatsoever. This is where open source usually wins, because it's lack of sophistication is usually an case of being pared back to the bare minimum to do the job.