CIO Today: The TCO of Open Source

“Open source has a reputation for being free, or at least cheap.
But when the costs of programming, customization, maintenance and
other factors are taken into consideration, enterprises can find
that conversion from proprietary platforms to open source offers
little or no savings.

“‘While open source appears to have a strong advantage in terms
of up-front licensing costs, the cost of operations over time needs
to be factored in,’ says Dana Gardner, senior analyst for
application infrastructure and software platforms for the Yankee
Group. ‘Counting operations, it is not clear open source is any
less expensive to maintain over time than Windows…'”

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