Open Source in the Enterprise

I guess many like me working in a large enterprise can relate to a story like this one: Jonathan Schwartz's Blog: Freedom's Choice:

The CIO responded categorically with 'we don't run MySQL, we run [name withheld to protect the proprietary].' The CISO said, 'We can't just let developers download software off the net, you know, we've got regulation and security to worry about.' The CTO smiled. Everyone else appeared to be sitting on their hands. I was going to leave it at that. Thanks for the business.

Until a (diplomatically) assertive Sun sales rep piped up, 'Um... no, I connected with a buddy of mine over at MySQL, and had him check - you've downloaded MySQL more than 1,300 times in the last twelve months.'

After a profoundly awkward silence, one of the individuals from their internal development team piped up, 'Actually, everybody uses it. Why bother hassling with license agreements when MySQL's got you covered. We're stoked you bought them.'

How does your enterprise deal with this? Is freely available software treated as an opportunity, or a threat?

Hvor er Open Source-milliardærene?

the.codist{} - We Are All Open Source Billionaires:

After reading Where Are All The Open source Billionaires, which made very good points, I thought to myself 'we are all open source billionaires'. This was echoed in some of the comments.

Yes, we don't have the money, but we gain the benefits of the work of thousands of folks toiling away on something they love and giving it free to the world. (...)

The web probably wouldn't even exist without open source contributions like HTML, Apache, Linux, etc.

Imagine you had to pay for everything you use. Some companies refuse to consider anything they haven't paid a bundle for. (...) I'm not saying for pay software is necessarily better or worse; in many cases the ROI doesn't make much sense if you can get something similar for nothing, and you still have to spend the same money on development, infrastructure, interconnectivity.