[Top19]

A good example of the ROI of Open Source is the OpenEMR project. That free system replaces multi-hundred thousand dollar hospital systems from companies like Cerner. I used to work at Oracle, and when I found out about OpenEMR I remember thinking "this makes the price difference between Oracle Enterprise Edition and MySQL Community look trivial".

A lot of times I hear the implementation cost is where all the money is so it doesn't matter what the software costs. That is sort of true, but large companies are not incentivized to make it any easier to implement, less they put their System Integrators out of business and/or push them to other vendors. The Open Source community does not have this incentive obviously.

EDIT: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEMR

[tonyedgecombe]

Actually I think the Open Source community does have that incentive, assuming the developers are making a living as system integrators.

[ajc-sorin]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Obvious