The obvious problem with proprietary code is the questionable quality of consulting companies, etc., but I think the biggest advantage to free software is inter

The obvious problem with proprietary code is the questionable quality of consulting companies, etc., but I think the biggest advantage to free software is interoperability. Right now, there are thousands of data entry jobs, whose sole purpose is to translate data from one system to another, often within the same organization. A friend of mine who has recently learned simple Visual Basic has told me about what he calls "huge" savings simply from writing scripts to copy and transform data rather than pay people to read and type it.