Software Licensing: The Next Generation

I am curious what the real life time costs are for wind power. I've seen numbers thrown around, but not sure what to believe.

Land based fossil fuel (oil and coal) power plants are generally designed for long term use (50+ years), there are design and manufacturing costs, maintenance expenses to keep them operating and of course the expense of the fuel as well as the operating expense of converting the fuel to electricity.

What time frame are wind turbines being designed for? For sea based wind farms, I would expect the design and manufacturing costs to be substantially higher than land based wind farms just do to the location and the fact that they operate in a rather caustic environment. How do maintenance costs compare? Labor expenses may be high based on specialized labor to sea based repairs. Are the designs reliable enough to last 50 years? Is the 'free fuel' enough to offset the other expenses to make wind based energy competitive with land based fossil fuels?

Sorry, my previous post was meant for a different thread. Please ignore.

The only license that makes any sense to me, as a user of software, is one that allows me to use/abuse the software as I see fit after I pay for it. So far, the GNU license is the only one that even comes close.

The IT industry conveniently ignores a major cost of adoption of new software- the learning curve. I am unlikely to invest my time into learning a new software that does not in some way enhance my earnings potential (or provide some other lifestyle enhancement that I can value, such as significant time savings for some specific task). As I evaluate a new software package that is supposed to enhance my efficiency or give me fantastic new capabilities that can enhance my market position, I have to study not only the basic up front costs, but also how much time is going to be required before I can reasonably expect the new product to start showing returns. There is a distinct possibility that my needs and the capabilities of the software are not completely synchronized, and the people marketing this product are not going to bring this to my attention. It is something that I will have to discover on my own.

If I am only "renting" software, it is very unlikely that I am going to be using it to the extent where I will have full comprehension of the capabilities of the package, because I am not investing the time in learning the use of the package. The vendor of the package is unlikely to be interested in tailoring his services to my specific needs (especially since I am a very small operation, and the value of my business would be far too low to justify a whole lot of attention on the part of the vendor). Since I have nto invested a whole lot of effort into understanding the peculiarities of the particular package, I am most likely going to need some extensive technical support.

An interesting phenomenon: technical support is far more readily available and much more sophisticated within the OpenSource community than anything I have ever encountered from commercial software (with the possible exception of a package called "AutoSignal").

If I can get better technical support for a package that I can tailor to my own needs for considerably less than what you are offering, why would I pay you a fee to only come close to meeting my needs? Especially since I would most likely have to invest the same amount of my time in getting up to speed no matter which approach I took...

There is also a good chance that the vendor is going to be "enhancing" his package over time, adding features to draw more clients, or to "improve" the user experience. I am not going to be at all happy when I log on to a site to use a piece of software, only to find that I have to spend an hour or so learning a new interface, just so I can do five minutes of data entry. No, renting software does not make any sense at all to me...