Reading my RSS I came across a post debating some supposed "myths about open source". Altho it's an endless debate and I haven't heard anything new for years, I decided to post this just 'cause I found it to be a quite concise and nice way to put things, for both sides of the fence. I hate cut and paste and reading the full articles helps, so here are the links (order matters):

• Don't trust your network to open source
• “Don’t Trust Your Network to Open Source” — huh?
• Open Source Myths Hold Water

I dont need to criticize the initial post 'cause the second one already does it perfectly, and the third finishes it off.
What I think has been forgotten are the grounds the first post has been written on: what you pay for is better than what you get for free. Again, it's a cultural problem, not a technological one, people value money and in such light are tricked to think the above. And in theory that is perfectly true, let's be honest, nobody is selling nobody's soul, there's nothing wrong with admitting that if paid to do what we love/know to do, we do a better job, if nothing 'cause we can spend more time on it.
Unfortunately there are enough proofs that in practice, neither paid development leads to better code, nor paid support is more efficient.
Bottom line, keeping in mind we're talking enterprises here, and not touching any of the ethical faucets of free software (yes, indeed, all enterprises but goggle do evil ;) ), preaching that free software as a product is better than proprietary software is in my opinion wrong; preaching that for the market we find ourselves today into it's better, is 100% right.
And so is outsourcing development to third-party companies rather than doing it in house. It's written nowhere that you have to give more money to billionaires enterprises like IBM, nor that you have to do it for cheap in India. There are choices, either one of the many Unix friendly consultancy agencies, or directly the core developers of the application you need help with.