Very true. One thing that seems very important to companies is support, i.e. "what if it breaks". This also tends to trump everything else, even the cost of a

Very true. One thing that seems very important to companies is support, i.e. "what if it breaks". This also tends to trump everything else, even the cost of an acquisition or its quality (frankly, many IT departments have a CYA policy). Even free software that is demonstrably superior in every way to some overpriced enterprisey solution could be shot down if it's not clear how someone would install and maintain the app, and if it's not clear where to go if the app exploded tomorrow. While it is valid to question how an app will be supported, I think that IT departments tend to give this too much weight and spend too little time thinking about what else they might do. "Run screaming to tech support person from vendor" is not a disaster recovery plan, but in too many organizations that seems to be all there is. What is the probability of an incident? How severe can the problems be? Would those problems have work-arounds? And ultimately, can all critical data be accessed and backed up regularly just in case of a failure? In the well-designed free software that I've seen, these questions have great answers and there's usually some bonuses like support forums, source code, and hundreds of known users worldwide. In other words, risk is pretty small and there is definitely some reward, but it requires your IT people to actually invest a little time to learn and to keep things moving (for example, to install new versions regularly and to brush up on scripting skills).