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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Right. A significant part of the reason open source wins so handily isn't that the money for a proprietary solution is always more than it's worth, it's that you can just pull open source dependencies without going through purchasing.

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Exactly. Going from $0 purchase cost to $0.01 is a nearly impossible problem in many organizations. Paradoxically, they'll find a way to waste $100k on an "enterprise" stack to do the same though.

If you're going to pay you might as well buy the best. Not saying that the enterprise stack is such a thing but that's how it's perceived.

$100k is on the cheap side, I've seen millions spent before upper management is convinced they should have gone with the open source solution that was already in place and working

I have also seen the other way around wasting large amounts on contracting for an open-source solution, and in the end the proprietary that everyone knows and loves, despite all its quirks, is the one that stays in place.

> Paradoxically, they'll find a way to waste $100k on an "enterprise" stack to do the same though.

Paying someone else to be the Single Wringable Neck when things go wrong is not the same as paying for some binaries.

This. Enterprise knows the fully baked cost of adding thousands of technologies. My last gig turned a $5k/year payment into about $100k just to avoid learning about MongoDB and the default Azure firewall. Used the same firewall as on prem, loaded up support contracts, kept team lean. It made sense in that context.

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