To scale, to modify, to be flexible and react rapidly to change. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD): the marketing strategy executed by established vendors when technically viable alternatives are available at incredible savings. Amazon reported that adopting open source software has reduced 25 percent of its technology expenses.

"It's very competitive world. If you're not looking to open source you are probably already dead. You just don't know it yet"

Forrester Research released a report that is optimistic about the future of open source databases in the enterprise. Improvements in security, availability, integration, automation and unstructured data management will make these low-cost platforms even more attractive for enterprise application.

Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna predicts 30 percent of enterprises will use open source databases in production by 2008.

Another well known example is Apache, which supports 67 percent of web sites on the Internet.

Sendmail, an open source email transfer program, carries an estimated 80% of the entire world's e-mail traffic.