Gentlemen,

I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree. Having multiple versions of Windows does make sense. It is not fair for a college kid who wants to write term papers, download music illegally, and play Starcraft to pay for the ability to join a domain and many of the other features of Professional or Ultimate.

As the old saying goes, though, the more things change the more they stay the same. In the Microsoft world, you have to make choices based on feature set and that determines what edition of the software you buy. Little if anything is free and you have to be careful that you get what you need. If you need support, you call MS's 800 number and pay $259 bucks and get support. Your money is refunded if MS cannot solve the problem or if the problem is the result of a bug in the software. In the Unix/Linux world you have to make choices based on what level of support you want. Do you want same day, next day, etc. You also have to accept limitations on what you can and cannot do with the product in question because for the vendor to support the product it must be in a "supported configuration." You pretty much get all the software for free (although there are today some limitations to that as well - see Red Hat's website). In the Mac world you pay top dollar for the latest and greatest in style/fashion and high levels of quality but make the trade-off of having a very limited feature set and submitting yourself to Apple's control.

So which do you want? Choices of different software editions or choices of different support editions? It's all different sides of the same coin.

Don't be so quick to slam MS for having different editions of its software. If all MS sold was the ENTERPRISE edition of SQL Server, how much would Amazing Charts cost then?

JamesNT

P.S. If you really want to see how frustrated you can get with all this, call Oracle.

Last edited by JamesNT; 04/09/2011 3:27 AM.
James Summerlin
My personal site: http://www.dataintegrationsolutions.net
james@dataintegrationsolutions.net