In the software industry, the best-documented, clearest, most present danger is the habit of complacency. And we have all seen that those who fail to move forward sink as surely as VA Linux's stock price. So it is no surprise that many companies and projects were opportunistically launched as open-source trial balloons, without much thought about return on investment or the appropriateness of the model to the task at hand. The tightening capital situation has reversed the open-source movement's momentum. Those enthusiastic trial projects look ill-conceived in retrospect.
Fashion is no longer justification enough to go open source.
Some enterprises jumped onto the open-source bandwagon because they thought they would save money. The purchase price of Windows 2000 Server is a million times higher than the purchase price of Linux, after all. Or at least, that was the rationale. In retrospect, this justification for moving to open source never made much sense. The purchase price of the operating system must be the smallest part of the overall cost of installing and operating an enterprise data system, dwarfed by training costs, support costs, the cost of change and other factors.