“Why buy expensive software or spend millions to develop it
yourself? You can get complex systems at absolutely NO COST! Yes,
instead of having highly paid programmers at Microsoft, IBM, Sun,
or even Blackboard build your critical university systems, you can
have scores of software gurus scattered around the globe working
completely independently build them for you FOR FREE. These folks
are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working
for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at
Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with
whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT
infrastructure.“This is the alluring pitch of open source software. We may have
to give up project planning, quality control, coding standards,
accountability, version control, and support, but it’s FREE and we
get the ability to modify the source code ourselves, something that
is extremely dangerous to do, was discredited decades ago, and few
people do anyway…”