Fascinating. IBM is looking to monetize their investment in Eclipse:

IBM's decision to offer support for Eclipse reflects the open source environment's growing presence among businesses - 30 per cent of enterprises and 25 per cent or so of small and medium businesses (SMBs) use Eclipse, analyst Evans Data Corp (EDC) estimates.

But it will have an interesting challenge in tackling price objections. This week at EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, EDC said it had found little appetite for paid support from Eclipse users. Just over 30 per cent expect support to be free while a third said if they would pay anything at all, it must be less than $100.

Well, it's going to be a tough row to hoe. IBM has trained people to expect things to be free, and now they have to live with those expectations. To Wit:

The sticking point seems to be the need to pay to support for a tooling environment that has the perception of being "free".

Well duh. Now they realize that.