Standards: In order for much of the equipment used in I.T. to communicate with each other, standards are required. One of the largest drivers in the industry for standards is open source standards. These freely available open source standards allow anyone with the capability to write software to use these standards. Many people working together spend many hours working on this software and allow it to be used for free. Thank you to that community! Being part of the community you too may be able to contribute toward it one day helping it on even further.
Customer lock-in: In my career I have witnessed several organizations being held back by customer lock-in. This is where a purchased piece of software does not allow you to do what you want without paying the company supplying the software money for modification. You can only go to the supplier of that software for modification, as the software is locked. Even after payment the software may still not do as you requested. In one case I witnessed in-house IT staff spend many hours modifying software, after payment for unlocking, only to loose that modification after final release of the supplied software using a different method of carrying out the task. Open source is clearly the way forward where it is almost expected that in-house IT staff will modify the software, and then share that modification to all. The customer drives the innovation without being held back, and we all benefit from it. In my mind this will become the fastest innovative software drive.
Security: With having many eyes looking over the software, Open Source software ends up being more secure, not less secure.