When switching costs are low, when contract termination is a choice rather than a chore, when vendor agnosticism is the way people do business, then we have Freedom.

I will make other points later, points about responsibility and abdication of responsibility.

Agree with you regarding poisonous vendor-designed lock-in strategies and transition costs. And I believe, as you appear to imply, that the benefits to be realised from FOSS are often long-term.

However, most large enterprises, are at any one point in time, likely to have numerous green-field projects launching. And whilst costs will have been sunk in enterprise-wide licensing deals (those mythical “all you can eat” and often perceived, as portrayed by vendors to those on the ground using their s/w, as “free”), they won’t all run concurrent and will come up for renewal.

In short, opportunities for making significant savings through utilising FOSS, will present themselves. However, it is clearly not a silver bullet, and as such an unconsidered push could lead to a hypoglycaemic failure, before those investments with longer term returns have had chance to metabolise.

So, perhaps we do need to tighten our belts, but we also need to seek out the quick wins whilst planning for the future. And FOSS will have a significant part to play here.

The fundamental choice is: re-arrange the deckchairs, or plot a completely new course for more favourable waters?

I agree that the time for change is ripe. But not in any of the ways you describe.

In these circumstances, the “not invented here” mentality won’t even get a look in so we should be honest with ourselves and admit that good people are going to lose their jobs as a result of the recession. That is a sad but most likely outcome.

Most enterprises of size are heavily locked in to vendor contracts deliberately designed to mitigate against short-notice cancellation.

I know from experience that such poison pills are widespread, generally represent millions of dollars of stranded costs and often totally blind-side naive management teams.

Furthermore platform transition to open source is absolutely not a cost-cutting option in the short to mid-term because even a small, simple transition costs a lot, financially and labour-wise.

In the short-term we are all going to have to tighten our belts. The wise will also look to the long-term and plan to do things better in the future.

We need to move forward from the redundant IT-centric paradigm. Check out my blog (Fighting the Trillion Dollar Bonfire) for more information.