Concerns about the lack of a commercial vendor behind many open source projects often lead application development executives to forgo technology that may help their organizations. But these concerns can be addressed with a strategy of selectively adopting open source components and treating them as if they had been created by internal development staff. With this strategy, open source software is managed and maintained just like any other internally developed software. The difference is that as long as the open source community remains viable, fewer resources will be required and the cost of acquisition will be lower.