[Kickaha]

Generally it comes down to three things:

1) Distrust of motives

Face it, almost no one in business does anything without a profit motive. Otherwise it wouldn't be *business*. So they're always looking for the hook... free software seems too good to be true, they're *convinced* that down the road someone will make them pay for it retroactively. The idea that *no company owns it* makes them twitch. (It took me weeks to convince my mother that nobody 'owned' the Internet. She simply couldn't comprehend how a commodity so valuable could be 'ownerless'.)

2) No obvious place to get support

Along with #1, the concept of getting help or support 'for free' is alien to most suits. "Well who do we call if something goes wrong?" They don't want a page of URLs to go check and ask questions on, they want a telephone number with someone on the other end they can scream at.

Edit: Speak of the devil, ran across this on a dev list just now: "It is a little frustrating. If we have a prob with our Sun OS, we contact Sun,
tell them what is going on, and they fix it or give us a way around it (tell us
what we are doing wrong, etc.). Can't do that with Linux...bummer."

3) No place to put blame

If MS software goes wonky, they have the illusion of the option of suing. Legally, they haven't a leg to stand on, but the litigious mentality is so strong that it makes them feel better to think that there's *someone* they can target in case things go badly.

Additionally, there may be other factors such as licensing issues. If I were a company, I'd have to really look several times at GPL'd software use - the GPL is too vague on 'derived works', on purpose - they *want* it to be viral. For that reason, I much prefer the BSD style licenses for business use. Heck, we looked hard at using BitKeeper instead of CVS here at UNC, and ended up not going with it because the license for the free version required us to publish our change logs publicly. Seems fair, to me - you want the product for free, you make the inner details of your software free as well. But it won't fly for projects with patent filings, so we're going with Subversion.

Even playing to the 'it costs *nada*' angle doesn't seem to work, the sheer oddity of something for 'free' seems to collide with their world view so fundamentally that it simply ain't gonna happen.