Over on The Register there is an article of ex-Sun founder Scott McNealy having a series of shots at Larry Elision, owner of Oracle who recently bought Sun out.

The comments are very interesting and include this one by an anonymous coward who shielded their name....
"GNU never said you're not allowed to make money out of your work
Posted Friday 5th November 2010 23:19 GMT

All it says is you're not allowed to enslave the end-users with your work. It is OK if you want to lock them in, twist their arm and squeeze their wallet, just don't use free software for that. Pick any proprietary license like others do.

Oh, and for me as an end-user, I certainly want that MY information remains free at least for myself if not for others. Even if this is crap for you, I don't want anybody to put a lock on my own data."

McNealy, the article and some of the posters make the principle point here, which is that it is a very dangerous game when you choose a closed system that will, once it has your data in its grasp, charge you a holy fortune to get away from them. You become a ready source of money for that company if you are not very, very, very careful. And how many organisations have the kind of money that it takes for the army of lawyers (or one very clever one) to spot all the traps and nooses in the contracts?

It is at times like this that it is worthwhile calculating the real, true cost of proprietary software versus hiring the team that it would take to run open source.

Fortunately for the general public, it has little information on databases save perhaps the address book on the mobile phone or perhaps the odd geek has the odd birthday list somewhere. For the corporates and more scary still, the public service, things are more serious.

As someone who is experiencing first hand the cost increases that Oracle are imposing on licensing and training now that it has bought Sun, it is concerning to witness.

The thing that has continuously struck me, year after year after year, is the people who buy mobile phones and put shed loads of data on them without ever giving a thought to what is going to happen when they move handsets. It is difficult enough when they change phones within the same manufacturer. If they want to change brand, then they're usually in very real trouble.

So long as we have people like this in charge of corporates and public services, then we will continue to waste copious amounts of money because of lack of forethought and vision.

Who among us believes that our mobiles will last more than a couple of years at the most, yet how many plan ahead for that moment? Why do these people think that database solutions and their supporting systems stay static forever more?

It brings me to mind of the classic You Tube clip by Fascinating Aida where the flight for fifty pence turned in to a very expensive trip by the time they'd finished. I particularly love the line for the end of the flight, "If you haven't prepaid to use the steps you'll have to feckin' jump."