I argued the point you make in the first sentence (good business sense to use OSS) with the plant manager of facility owned by a materials research and development company back in 1999. The debate was good natured, but there was no middle ground to be found between our arguments. After a bit of time, the plant manager smiled and sent me to make the same arguments to the corporate lawyer. I could not for the life of me figure out what that was about until I went and discussed it with the legal eagle. The answer I received from corporate council was "ok if we use this OSS stuff, who would we sue if something went wrong?" This guy was not kidding. I still have to laugh at my own shock. We were spending 10's of thousands on licenses, upgrades and service agreements so we could have someone to blame if something went wrong. Risk analysis apparently indicated that external culpability was worth more than stable working product.

What a bloody waste. We could have spent half of what we did on a few good people and had stable systems...