I think it is a case of perception, and unfortunately, when dollars start to change hands, perceptions change. My take is that Boonex are trying to head towards a world class commercial product, not a free open source one. If this is not the case then my previous post is partly wrong.

That said - Dolphin is not a community product - it is developed by a closed house, Support is not really supplied by the community either - try using other open source apps or take part in the open source community see more a bit more and you will soon learn that Boonex is waaay behind the competition in the support stakes - free or otherwise.

I am a big contributor to the open source community, I utilise open source software at my business, with all of the products that I use and supply there is still an expectation of support. Support is what sets the open source community AHEAD of companies like Micro$oft - nothing to do with dollar value. Bug fixes are addressed AS SOON AS THEY OCCUR (nearly all Linux distro's update daily) these updates are supplied co-jointly by developers and the community. These are the things that make the open source community great.

Take Ubuntu for example. Their server distro is one of the most employed webservers out there. They have guaranteed support on 8.10 until 2012. And the cost - Nothing. They are fast becoming Micro$ofts biggest competitor and don't charge a bean for their products. Dell and others even supply their machines with Ubuntu pre-installed and the cost saving is passed on to the consumer. (Oddly enough you can also remove the server signature at no cost.)

I don't know why people keep comparing open source apps to Micro$oft, perhaps it is the only product people know. Ubuntu is every bit as complex as M$ Windoze and is free - try your Micro$oft comparison with Ubuntu or any of the other Linux distros and see if your argument still stands.

IMHO with the prices that are being charged it IS MOST DEFINITELY a commercial product, or at least trying to be one, if this is not the case then I retract my earlier statement about reasonable pricing.

To recap - I think that the pricing is reasonable for a PROFESSIONAL product - that is a product that has decent support, structured (bug free) releases and some kind of product lifecycle. These are my expectations.