Alright, I can come up with a reasonable explanation:
For databases and servers a lot of bugs and corner cases are only hit by servers that get loads and loads of traffic. Fixing those bugs cost a significant amount of money. By charging more to the high-traffic servers the cost of fixing those bugs can be justified.
It is also fair, in a sense, because only the high throughput servers really benefit from the extensive testing and stability, so why shouldn't they be the ones to pay for the fixes?
I agree with charging more for the Datacenter edition than for Standard edition, for those same reasons . But that's not a reasonable technical explanation for artificially limiting the amount of memory your OS can use. I was specifically referring to that issue.
Exactly. And to be fair, Novell and Red Hat have done similar things with SLE and RHEL and, come to think of it, openSUSE and Fedora. Since the code's open, it isn't quite the same, but both offer different levels of service and maintenance, available at varying prices.
Alright, I can come up with a reasonable explanation:
For databases and servers a lot of bugs and corner cases are only hit by servers that get loads and loads of traffic. Fixing those bugs cost a significant amount of money. By charging more to the high-traffic servers the cost of fixing those bugs can be justified.
It is also fair, in a sense, because only the high throughput servers really benefit from the extensive testing and stability, so why shouldn't they be the ones to pay for the fixes?