David Jones is partner in a consulting business based around the Open for Business (OFBiz) project. This project began in May 2001 and is licensed under the MIT Open Source licence, and approved under the Open Source Initiative. (Bill Koff says he has not heard of the project, even though it started well before his project, bears the same name as his report and CSC has a longstanding relationship with MIT.)

Speaking with the Technology Evaluation site (technologyevaluation.com), Jones admits that, as far as his consulting organization is concerned, "if we're going to make changes or additions for somebody, generally it will be a big contract, or something we're interested in doing.

"Their [clients'] requests in the open source project could sit there forever unless we get a contract, someone is interested in doing it, or we want to move the project in a new direction that just happens to cover that . . . If someone comes along with a need and they don't have any funding for it, it's basically throw it out to the community and see what sort of resource sharing can happen with common interests."

Later Jones says "the community is reasonably large . . . and the functionality, especially in certain areas, is pretty mature, but trusting it, even being willing to take a look at it, is not very common for a lot of companies. I think the trust factor is a big deal."

Jorg Janke, developer of the open source ERP/CRM solution Compiere, and another Technology Evaluation interviewee, adds to this fear of the reliability of the open source community. "We have a significant number of downloads and a significant user base, but as a percentage, the number of people who pay is relatively low. That's the general business model you find in the open source area, that is, lots of people are using it, but not that many paying for support. For example, JBoss has several million downloads but if you take the number of support contracts they have, it's actually not even in the percentage range. From that perspective, if you don't have a high volume constituency, open source software is not a long-term viable business."

It is these sorts of concerns that add a caveat to the generally positive spin that LEF gives the topic.

In the introduction, the report admits that "open source is not a silver bullet; it is not inherently good just because it is open source. Open source software is not appropriate for every situation; it will not displace proprietary software overnight."

(Note that last word.) It goes on to concede that "there is plenty of good proprietary software on the market, which can and should be deployed". This sounds like damning with faint praise, an impression that is reinforced when the report then adds that "the lines are blurring between proprietary and open source".

The report does admit that there are serious fears and concerns, republishing survey results from Forrester Research that showed that lack of support is the number one concern of most potential users of open source software (57 percent of respondents, who were allowed multiple responses). This was followed by product immaturity (42 percent), lack of applications (42 percent) and lack of client skills or knowledge (36 percent). Security was a concern for only 19 percent of respondents. The report makes mention of some of these issues, including switching costs, legal costs, providing resources, long-term viability, objective TCOs, reliance on a volunteer community, timeliness and the potential lack of support.

However, whenever it raises user concerns, the report is usually pretty quick to dismiss them. "There is a common perception that technical support is a serious shortcoming of open source software. However, support is proving to be a fertile ground in the open source arena, rich in business opportunities for IT service and solution providers, software vendors, application service providers and others". And Koff himself thinks the fears are not well founded.

Actually, it was this plethora of opportunities for providers that worried one CIO when approached for this article. His concern was that open source would prove a boon for the IT service industry, to the detriment of clients.