Lori Key was concerned about her software vendor. The company, which she declines to name, provided North Carolina's Johnston County with map-serving software to power an application that gives its 145,000 citizens crucial information about every parcel of land in the area. But the vendor was having financial trouble and because the county rented the software, Key knew she would be left with nothing should the developer declare bankruptcy.

The fear of having nothing to show for years of paying software fees played a strong role in the county's decision to switch to an open source map-serving product called MapServer developed at the University of Minnesota, says Key, an analyst with Johnston County's technology services department. MapServer, along with other open source components including the PostgreSQL database and Refractions Research's PostGIS for working with geographical objects, allowed the county to sever its dependency on commercial software for its geographic information system application.

Many organizations are finding the move not just to open source operating systems but critical applications to be a worthwhile one, though it's still far from a mainstream decision. Within the next three to five years, Forrester Research Senior Analyst Michael Goulde expects more companies to bet on open source applications not only for the cost savings, but also to cut down on headaches that proprietary software causes.

"One of the realms you always get into with business applications is they never quite do the job the way you want it done. With proprietary software you always have to chase down the vendor to get customization," Goulde says. "One real attraction of open source business applications is conceivably anybody can do the customization and support it."

Ready for primetime

Some companies are ready to jump into open source applications now. "There has been a lot of legitimate concern in recent years that open source was not commercial grade, and it wasn't," says David Whiles, director of IS at Midland Memorial Hospital in Texas. "But I believe its time has come."