I am dipping my toes into another world. Because of a project that will involve IBM mid–range systems, I've been reading a little about IBM i. I've not used it, so I'll reserve judgement about the operating system (formerly known as OS/400) itself, but just reading about the licensing makes it clear I'm steering into unfamiliar waters. As I understand it you have to pay a per–processor license fee and then a per–user fee on top of that. If your server gets busy, you can pay an additional ongoing fee for "Capacity on Demand", which I'm told enables hardware that's already in your server.
I can't help but contrast this with my most recent (admittedly very small) server project: we bought the hardware, which includes a dual–core Intel Xeon processor, 2 Gbytes of RAM, a few hard disks and so on. I installed NetBSD, which I downloaded at no cost. It is my usual practice to compile a kernel tailored for each NetBSD host I put into service so this time I enabled SMP, so the load is spread between the cores in the machine. NetBSD recognizes all of the RAM, so that's available too. Although NetBSD people might not compare themselves to IBM (apples and oranges), it strikes me that we got real on–demand capacity (albeit on a very small scale): the hardware is there when we need it, with no action (and no payment!) required.
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