• Lower TCO: Even after factoring in the cost of securing third-party support, open source application servers are significantly less expensive than any of the commercial application server suites that are currently available. You may refer to David Wheeler’s excellent analysis of this topic at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html#tco.
  
  
  
• Quality of Service: Because everyone has equal access to open source software, competition among third-party support organizations will necessarily keep your quality of service high.
  
  
  
• Quality of Product: Thousands of skilled and highly motivated professional developers work on these products every day, providing peer review and transparency that cannot be duplicated in a traditional software development practice. CIO Magazine addresses the people behind the open source initiative in this informative article sidebar: http://www.cio.com/archive/031503/opensource_sidebar_3.html.
  
  
  
• Rapid Response: In the event that a defect is discovered in the code base of any open source products you may be using, there is no need to wait for a subsequent release to get an appropriate fix. You may work with your open source support vendor to make the necessary corrections, or have your own developers patch the source code directly if you prefer.
  
  
  
• Avoid Vendor Lock-In: Open source software helps you avoid the scenario where you become so dependent upon a particular vendor for products and services that you cannot move to another vendor without substantial costs. With open source software you will be able to maintain a more vendor-neutral position.
  
  
  

For More Information
Much has been written regarding the benefits and rationale for an enterprise open source initiative. Please refer to the following additional reference materials for more information:

“ The Free Software Definition” from the Free Software Foundation (FSF):
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

“ The Open Source Case for Business” from the Open Source Initiative (OSI):
http://opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php

“ A Business Case Study of Open Source Software”, Carolyn A. Kenwood:
http://www.mitre.org/work/tech_papers/tech_papers_01/kenwood_software/kenwood_software.pdf