Open-source server appliance is "free"

I think you guys are missing the point. The appliance is free and yours to keep forever. You can even keep using the software on it for as long as you want. The support contract gives you much more than that though. Sure, if you have the time & experience to set up and maintain a system like this its not a good deal. But I'd bet that you would spend far more than $3,000 in time, energy and opportunity cost to keep it running.

With us you also get disaster recovery, software updates, & paid support and in my experience that really makes the boss sit up and take notice. The one friction point I always had when trying to "sell" an idea internally was they needed someone to blame if/when things went south. I started KangarooBox to get FOSS out into the world and to let people know that you don't have to pay overinflated prices for crappy software.

If you can set up Redmine on your server and your boss doesn't mind paying you to do it, great! I will be the first one in line to congratulate you and push you forward. If not, then we can help.

Spam... it's not free, it's loaned if you take on a $3k support contact. This is just a poorly disguised advert for an over-expensive piece of kit.

Flagged this article.

Interesting idea, freebie hardware with paid support. Similar to MySql arrangement but for hardware. It's the actual terms that just don't seem attractive. $3k support contract on what is practically an embedded device? I could see paying some money for support on a cluster of these to do something interesting, like distributed data acquisition nodes maybe? But not to the tune of 3,000 per node.

Yeah, it's "free" with a $3k support contract. Yikes!

Based on those stats (wait, only one ethernet port?), you would probably be better off with something like a Soekris board (http://www.soekris.com/, esp. a 4801 http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm). They run OpenBSD quite well...