The general view of open source software is that it is free; however, as with many things in business, information technology is never that easy. Switching to open source needs to involve careful planning and consideration of the business benefits and potential downsides to such a migration. read more
If you want to provide a gentle introduction to open source from a business angle, this is a very good article.
While the author describes open source licencing incorrectly at first, though for the audience — people at SMEs who aren’t knowledgeable of open source — it’s a reasonable simplification. Later on, he introduces some misconceptions about open source and corrects many of the incorrect first statements. A good way to do it without swamping the novice. He even covers the software as a commodity angle.
He has a couple typos, though;
“Many software products are now commodities. example, most organisations’ needs for operating systems and databases can be met by standard products, and many don’t need the bells and whistles that come with the expensive, high-end packages.”
Either ‘example’ should be capitalized and : used for emphasis, or should be ‘For example,’ instead. Later on, he also has a sentence start with ‘these cases’, so maybe one of his editing tools chopped it?