CIOs Love Commercial Support

Jonatahn Schwartz has an interesting new blog post about an event where he recently spoke extensively with a large group of CTOs from big online companies and a large group of CIOs from a range of large companies. There were some interesting observations about the different attitudes around support services for open source:

• Not a single company in the CTO room paid for software. Many knew Sun exclusively from our work in the open source or academic arena - validating free communities as a vehicle to meet new opportunities, before they join the Fortune 100.
• In contrast, not a single company in the CIO room allowed free software without a commercial support contract. Not one. Validating the notion that for more mature/diverse companies, the cost of downtime dwarfs the cost of a support contract.

I think this validates the need for commercial support of open source projects when they are being consumed into a CIO's domain for providing IT services to his/her own organization -- which is the case in most of our higher education business.