Years ago, when Open Source software first started to attract public attention, I joined with the bulk of IT support services companies to deride the stuff as amateurish, buggy, and unsupported. I realize now that I was reacting to what appeared to be a potential threat to my livelihood. More than that, I had underestimated what could be accomplished by a group of people working for free at something. I shouldn't have. Today, I stand with many of my computer network consulting peers and say that Open Source software is changing the rules for small business computer support.

I have a computer at home that runs nothing but free software. It's too old to run the current versions of Windows, or Microsoft Office, or Internet Explorer, or Adobe Acrobat, or just about anything else that would cost me a couple hundred dollars at the local Office Depot. Nonetheless, I have an office suite, a web browser, an email client, a photo image editor, and loads more on the box. So why haven't we started using more of this stuff within the offices of our Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers?

They are still afraid of it. That's why. And to some extent, so are we. Afterall, if we have a problem with Microsoft software, we know exactly who to blame. With Open Source, we don't have any idea who to blame. Does it matter though? After we blame Microsoft, we go looking for non-Microsoft resources to help us fix the problem as often as not. The same could be done for the Open Source applications.

Don't think that I'm recommending we all abandon the major software vendors and send them running to Congress for a bailout. I'm only suggesting that it is past time we started trying to use some of this on the periphery. That's what I've been doing.