Dealing with paid software in corporate america is a terrible experience for all involved. As a user: I see some software I might be interested in trying. I ha

Dealing with paid software in corporate america is a terrible experience for all involved. As a user: I see some software I might be interested in trying. I have to go to generally some nameless, faceless group to get them to buy it. I open a ticket, or get an inquiry started, and they start asking boilerplate- do we have similar tools already, what is the license, etc. If we get past this phase, there is typically some kind of legal review. Maybe a few weeks later we can actually have this on our machine in some form. From a company perspective: A user wants to buy yet another piece of software that we have to manage and keep track of. We will have yearly contract renewals to deal with most likely, understanding and holding them to their support model, ensuring they don't phone home, ensuring we are in compliance with our number of licenses, etc- this is all quite a bit of continued work. Also- how do we package this software and get it out to our users- there is a process for that as well. With FOSS, we have none of these problems aside from the potential phone home problem, which isn't really a problem, because we restrict by default. It's just a much more pain-free process.