In the early days open source was all about lower costs, but these days the apps have matured to such a point (on par or better than proprietary) that the conversation is shifting to value - getting more from your applications at a lower cost and enabling your developers to be more efficient. Since I am most familiar with the Integration/SOA market I will use that as my example. Typical enterprise software vendo In the early days open source was all about lower costs, but these days the apps have matured to such a point (on par or better than proprietary) that the conversation is shifting to value – getting more from your applications at a lower cost and enabling your developers to be more efficient. Since I am most familiar with the Integration/SOA market I will use that as my example. Typical enterprise software vendors in the SOA space are looking to sell services as much as they are software. In Tibco’s case 56% of their revenue last quarter came from services. The main thing this says to me is that the software is entirely too complex for the user base. Basically when you buy Tibco a consultant shows up with 4 CDs and you pay for 3 months of professional services. Maybe at the end of the 3 months you have your proof-of-concept done, but odds are your team are not that well versed in the technology. If you look at the net gain vs. the cost of developer time and professional services it seems very difficult to quantify. Contrast this with the open source approach, using Mule as the example.Typically we see developers download Mule and be up and running within a few hours. The developer already has Java skills (which are common, unlike Tibco, Webmethods, etc) and if they spend 3 months working with the product they will become extremely well versed in the technology, enhance existing development skills and complete the POC all by themselves. And if they want to make changes, extensions etc. to the software, they can. Open source is about empowering and enabling developers – and making it less expensive for businesses to run their IT shops. Meanwhile back at the POC, your consultant probably did a great job, but you’ll never get that knowledge in-house and your development team will be at a disadvantage being stuck with proprietary tools.One interesting thing we are working on is determining exactly how much time it would take to create a similar Mule function to just writing it in Java, or using an App Server like WebLogic. So far, all of our tests are showing that using Mule is somewhere between 1-10% of the development time. That’s a huge gain for developers just by using a well-designed product. The fact that it’s open source means that you can customize it without having to get in line and pray that the proprietary vendors are going to meet your needs. I don’t want this to read like an advertisement, but I can only speak from my experience. If your company (open source or otherwise) has any data on this I would be happy to post it. Open Source