Tales from the Proprietary: OSS is good for your business model

[housetier]

Over there at newsforge I found an article titled Why proprietary software is dangerous for business-critical applications. This is from a site that doesn't produce new headlines every minute so I usually read their articles. This particular article is interesting (for me at least) because it shows Why proprietary software can be dangerous for business-critical applications (note: different link text, same link target).

But the real point here is that an entire medium-sized company's executive staff has learned a hard lesson about the dangers of proprietary software, and members of that staff who previously resisted open source are now ready to consider it -- and for business continuity reasons rather than as a money-saving measure, no less.

[f0dder]

Nasty... does show that you need to check licenses when you order software, especially software as critical as this. And that you need to be careful with hardware-locked anti-piracy systems.

Obviously using a commercial product didn't mean they got decent support, so they might as well have used some OpenSource stuff (if it was available)

[mouser]

i really think this is important thing in favor of open source.
on the other hand i guess you have to compare this with a counterpoint disadvantage

OS Advantage: no worries that you will end up hostage to a commercial company forcing you to upgrade or pay to have some proprietary migration.
OS Disadvantage: worry that the work on the project will dry up and leave you with no one you can pay to get some work done.