I've had inquiries along these lines from the sales force of my employer (whose customers tend to be conservative, mainframe-centric shops). My newbie-to-the-mainframe-world response was something like "why would they want to buy something they can get for free?" The answer was basically that they want someone take responsibility for evaluating and testing code, who they can call when something breaks and be sure of an immediate response.
Not to get too far off topic, but "free" software is only free if you have the people with the time and expertise to exploit it effectively for your organization. There are plenty of companies out there who find it cheaper to license software for $50K/year (knowing that they can call someone on New Years Eve if it breaks) than to hire developers at $100K/year who will turn off their pagers on New Years Eve :-) This is one reason why mainframes still do the heavy lifting, years after a paper and pencil cost/benefit analysis of the hardware and systems software licensing costs would indicate that it makes no sense. This probably applies to all sorts of expensive DBMS, ERP, and app server software, not just mainframe shops.
The need for support is (and will continue to be) a big, big thing. This is one of the reasons we see stories like this - where IBM is offering some level of support to open source users.
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