Disagreeing with Seth Godin

In this article Meeting, my favorite marketing guru Mr Seth Godin reacts to an article in Gaping Void and argues about the Open source actually meeting the current needs of the shareholder community. To quote:

“It turns out that open source can do a brilliant job of meeting their actual needs (lower overhead to install and maintain, higher productivity to use, more stable over time) but the problem is that apparent needs (playing it safe, making your boss happy) almost always get in the way”

But he fails to take into account the cost of operations. I mean, in our setting, yes, the Open source software is free and so your initial capex is lower. But try hiring a good open source sysad and compare that to the asking price of a Microsoft sysad and your ‘initial savings’ will soon evaporate because good open source sysads are hard to come by!