I haven't yet found out the costs of the RM support and provisions, nor whether it is an annual contract cost, or whatever. That seems to be very hard to come by - I suspect that it is quite pricey and a lot of it somewhat hidden costs. Anyway, what sort of bottom line provision can one get for proper support, software installed and working, ongoing support and maintenance, appropriate educational materials for the various key stages etc. and still remain out of the clutches of Microsoft? I'd like to shift our cost spend from paying for software to paying for the labour costs of value added services, which is the basis of the economics of open source anyway IMHO (and a more moral position too boot, but lets leave this out of the query for now!). Anyone got anything for me to start building a case upon? Hard figures please :-)
I'd rather not start using this list as an advertising medium so I'm not going to post figures, but you can find some on our web site (http://www.fensystems.co.uk/prices.html and http://www.fensystems.co.uk/support.html). HTH, Michael