[inceptivecss]

Regardless of what you paid for a piece of software, if it is critical to your business operations you should be paying someone to maintain it for you.

If you were a small lawn mowing company and happened to receive a free mower for your operations, you wouldn't just run it into the ground without regularly paying someone to keep it in good repair (though this analogy does raise some interesting thoughts about companies in general and their maintenance policies).

In exactly the same way, you shouldn't be using software of any kind, paid or not, without having some plan for maintenance and repair.

If free software can cover the same business needs as paid software, there's no reason to not use it. But you absolutely cannot sacrifice maintenance just because you did or didn't pay money for the software itself.

[knightofmars]

If it's cheaper to buy a new mower every year and sell the used one compared with paying someone a salary to do maintenance then which would you choose?