When is commercial (or 'professional') support desired, compared to the "free" kind?
some companies have established a "blame game" culture where any decision-maker has to have his back covered every possible way he/she can. In these cases, when deciding in favour of a product, the career of that decision-maker is likely linked to its success (or failure). The availability of a commercial support based on a legal contract provides some kind of calmness that upcoming problems will be solved (otherwise, the company would sue), no matter how ugly the corresponding hack is or which problems it might cause in the long term. The last time I demonstrated an open-source-based concept, it took some time working against this stance.
I think, for these companies, commercial support finally boils down to have someone else bitten in the "blame game". You can hardly sue "loosely coupled" members of a mailing list who developed free software, but you can sue a company that entered a legal contract on full commercial support for not doing so.
My 0.02€ so far, best regards,
Michael Hartle
