Forbes.com on "Cheapware", or the open source option

Forbes.com - Cheapware:

"Craig Murphy has had enough. As chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings, which runs the world's largest airfare and ticketing network. Murphy has spent millions of dollars on database and other software from companies like Oracle. But last year, when Sabre was building a new computer system for online shoppers. Murphy took a flyer on a database program from a little-known company in Sweden that charges only $495 per server computer, versus a $160,000 list price for Oracle. Guess what? The Swedish stuff works great. Fired up, Murphy is hunting for other places to use the cheaper software, called MySQL.

"We're just not going to pay license fees for those databases like we used to. We'll download free stuff off the Internet before we do that," Murphy says. "I believe this is the future of computing."

Wow, that's rough. And it's happening over and over again, and I imagine after a profile in Forbes, it will just accelerate.

What are you doing to consider MySQL? Story via Sadagopan.