Mirasol Op'nWorks - Open Source Expertise

•	Life long production license and/or maintenance fees.
•	Limited (if at all) choice of development shop for application correction, changes and upgrade.
•	Always a possibility of "orphan" framework with disappearance of vendor or abandon of the framework by the vendor.

•	No runtime license and very competitive maintenance fees.
•	Usually large choice of development shops for application correction, changes and upgrade.
•	With large open-source community, chances of ending up with an orphan framework are low.

Development and production license fees

Can be very high. If obligation to pay development license fees, you pay whether or not you eventually deploy a solution.

If production license fees, you pay for each host.

By definition, no development or production license fees to pay.

Flexible feature set

Must convince the vendor to build feature in next release. No control on roadmap if not a major account.

Can always commission the addition of a feature to a third party or do the work in-house.

Portability

Usually limited - Only platforms and middleware supported by vendor.

Usually wide - Always the possibility to commission the port to a new platform.

Software fixes to framework

Under vendor control.

Under customer control.

Software robustness

Depends on vendor and software maturity

Depends on size of community and quality of code base.