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good points..

These points are worth considering. We are currently testing SugarCRM and vTiger. There is a learning curve involved and time consumption is vast. We are a small company that is growing and adding products to our services and we need software to manage this expansion. Time can be manufactured easier than cash at this stage of business. If we were better funded it is not likely we would be going this route or we would be taking the paid services to have these open source systems set up for us. The software is still very good, you pay one way or another.

I voted this up since the premise is valid, but the points are very weak. Maybe it should have been titled "is open source necessarily effortless". Of course, the answer is no. Does open source have a learning curve. Yes. Does commercial software have a learning curve? Yes. Does open source sometimes benefit from paid support. Yes. Does commercial software sometimes benefit from paid support. Yes. These are not differentiators. A discussion of the relative cost and what you get for the extra money you spend on commercial software would be more interesting.

This article has nothing to do with open source but with software.

- Switching cost ? There is a cost if you want to migrate from a proprietary software for another. It can also even be true for the same software in different versions (I'm thinking MS Office here but there is many cases...)

- Learning curve ? You've never had to learn how to use Windows or Visual Studio ?

Also the quote from Bill Gates is really misleading. Dozens of people are paid to work on OSS (althought almost every one of them are working on big projects, or small, niche projects required by some companies).
When you pay for your copy of, let's say Adobe Photoshop, you're not really paying the developpers. You are paying the shareholders, the bosses, the marketing people... who knows what part of the licence fee gets to the devs ?
When you pay or hire a developper to integrate an application in your company, to fix a bug or to add a feature, you are only paying the devs, and the managers if you asked a FLOSS company to manage the project.

You may want to read the title of your blog.

Open source software trades off cost for time - if you are willing to invest some of your own time, you can save a lot of cost.

For developers at the bottom of the IT food chain, getting budget for new technologies is next to impossible, so there is a high willingness to invest personal time to avoid procurement hell.

The value prop of open source is not low cost per se, but the ability to put new technologies to the test at low cost.

I wrote more about this on my blog under the heading "The Silverado Rules for Open Source Success"

http://www.keeneview.com/2008/02/silverado-rules-for-open-source-success.html