I think this misses the mark, at least in the enterprise world. What the commercial companies have is huge sales teams- sales personnel that know how to convince people to by their product.
It is actually easier for an enterprise IT team to buy a product than to adopt an open source package. IT shops have a process for buying stuff, including evals, pilot deployments, purchasers to haggle with the vendor, and clear lines of ownership, authority, and responsibility for the product and its uptime.
In a lot of enterprises, none of that works for open source. Even if the code just works, without going through the buying motions, nobody cares. It just sits there. Nobody wants to depend on it, because nobody wrote a check for it, so it doesn't seem real.
It's so true. In order to evaluate open source software you have to have someone competent set it up. However with a software vendor they can provide a demo and you can have different key levels of management evaluate it.
I think the problem is one of expertise and motivation. A software vendor will necessarily be an expert in their own product, and they have a huge incentive to sell it. Internal IT staff are not going to be expert in some random open source package. Their expertise is going to be domain knowledge, and their interest is just to make sure things are working smoothly. In theory they would prefer better quality open source software, but in practice they need someone on the hook to blame when things go wrong just as the brass does.
I think this could be changed though. If a corporation had the mindset that they wanted their IT to be a competitive advantage, recruited and paid accordingly, I think a large corporation could mop the floor using the right mix of proprietary and open source.
I really think the problem is simpler than that; in most enterprises, I think there's literally a company neurotransmitter that doesn't get activated until someone has to cut a check. Until your project gets JBoss-big --- hell, even after that --- nothing you do is going to get open source taken seriously.
I base this in part on a number of friends who have hugely successful open source deployments in their companies (BSD/pf firewalls, for instance), and who are locked in a constant struggle to keep those deployments from getting "upgraded" to "real software".
I assume you're talking about noncommercial free/open source software.
I imagine it's very easy to deal with Red Hat, the PostgreSQL company, SUN/Oracle (who the hell owns MySQL??), etc. They all have sales teams and purchasing departments and all that jazz.
