The biggest trick is in figuring out how to get them to pay for it. I've found, at least in the US Federal Government, that OSS is usually considered 'good' at

The biggest trick is in figuring out how to get them to pay for it. I've found, at least in the US Federal Government, that OSS is usually considered 'good' at all levels. Occasionally there is skepticism, but generally, it's viewed positively. However, what many OSS apps lack is a backing company to engage for support. A scenario, if you will: I am the CTO of a federal agency, and I am looking to cut costs over the long run and replace an aging legacy system. I see that OSS_APP_A is a direct drop-in with minimal switching costs, however, OSS_APP_A has no 'RedHat, Inc' behind it. OSS_APP_B however, doesn't appear to be quite as fully featured, and would probably require contracting time to fully switch over, which we can hire 'OSS_APP_B, Inc' to do. If it breaks, we can call 'OSS_APP_B, Inc', and we can hire them to do the work. Also, if it fails, we can blame them and get out of paying on the contract until such time it is fixed. Open source is nice, but in government, generally, systems are more critical than others. Swapping out their office suite to OpenOffice is probably a no-brainer, but swapping out Microsoft IIS for Apache is a little scarier, because what happens if it breaks? So they don't use Apache, they instead hire a company like Covalent which offers a little value-add on top of Apache, but basically, they're "someone to blame" if/when it doesn't work. If there's a particular piece of software you'd like to push, and it doesn't have some kind of formal backing, you might consider that a business opportunity. Though federal sales is hard and trying, it can also be quite lucrative, at least in the US.