Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Open source software is continuing to gain acceptance with IT decision-makers throughout North America and Europe. The creation of concrete standards, along with the continued adoption of open source, has even opened the eyes of organizations that were previously holding out against open source adoption. The low license costs of open source software are hard to ignore, but companies that hesitate to adopt continue to worry about where to get support for it. Companies without internal development skills are unwilling to risk running a business process using software that has questionable support. Forrester helps clients with these concerns and offers best practices for implementing open source software within an organization's current infrastructure.