he "free" refers to the perception that most people have about Open Source Software. Commercial OSS vendors reinforce this belief when they use price as a selling point. Consider this tweet by Alfresco Software (which is an OSS Content Management vendor: The City of Denver saved $1.5M by migrating from Documentum to Alfresco"

OSS vendors need to sell "freedom" as well as price if that's how they want to be perceived.They are the ones sowing the seeds.

Also, if you read this article more closely,and to the end, you'd see that it cites a study by Coverity (a huge proponent of OSS) that found that larger OSS projects aren't as of high quality, that they need commercial vendors behind them and so on...

It also mentions that Drupal has 650 distros, 20,000 modules etc...that should speak to the argument for "freedom".

Read on, and it says that commercial vendors who want to offer Big Data solutions can't make it without adding a flavor of Hadoop or NoSQL into their mix. Doesn't that speak well of OSS?

Further on it quotes Kevin Cochrane, OpenText's VP of Marketing (who made his career at two commercial OSS companies); he makes an argument for how enterprise-grade proprietary software can offer some of the same benefits as OSS "We can give a safe, secure, and compliant platform to our community so that they can focus their initiative on what's most meaningful to them: unleashing the power of information to transform line of business functions to gain faster time to innovation, faster time to market, faster time to revenue, faster time to customer success.”

Want to know what OSS developers can do better? Cochrane's comment offers an answer: "provide a safe, secure, and compliant platform". That is, by the way, exactly what many OSS commercial vendors are trying to build.

Later the article talks about how OSS appears to be risky to Enterprises whose businesses aren't technology and/or whose engineers aren't project commiters. Consider that if Netflix has a problem with Cassandra, and that for some reason Datastax disappears, they'll be OK because they have engineers on the Apache project.But if Consumer Products Company XYZ has a problem and no one knows Cassandra well, they'd likely think that they're up a creek without a paddle.For them, OSS may be to big a risk. Oracle, as much as it may cost and stink, may be a better bet..until Oracle's offering can't solve their problem.

That being said, all of the points you two make and the questions you ask are worth discussing. Maybe an article on the subject is in order. Until one is written, and if you are truly interested, look at the different strategies that MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and Pivotal are taking around Hadoop. Some say that at least two of them are no longer OSS. Let that can be your case study.You might see how freedom evolves to something that is no longer free, in every sense of the word.

Finally,and this could be the subject of still another article, what do you say about a project that has 15 committers. Is a CIO not to take into account what the future might look like if the commiters get into a fight, move on to new projects. or lose interest? The perception is that the Enterprise might end up with an abandoned technology and without support.

To be frank,on an ideological level, I lean toward OSS but, in practical terms at the Enterprise level, there are still many questions that OSS vendors will need to have answers for.

Finally, the article concludes by saying that Enterprises shouldn't be asking "Proprietary or OSS" but which solves their problems best. There are many considerations and many arguments for each.