A nice article on how one software development firm uses OSS in their daily functions. What also makes this interesting is that they discuss their transition from COBOL to Java and what tools were needed (including the consultant).

Open-source software has been an aide to our software development firm and as I sit here, writing this article in OpenOffice.org, I can see the use of OSS only growing. When I discussed writing this article with our president, he was fairly surprised by the amount of open-source software in our company. He knew the names of the projects but was not aware that they were open-source. We even joked about putting Linux on his laptop. Some colleagues have expressed interest in installing Linux on their development machines in a dual-boot scenario. Other colleagues use OSS projects on their Windows machines to test user interfaces, validate XML and test office compatibility. We have managed to bring numerous OSS projects into everyone’s vocabulary and have proven the reliability and usefulness of OSS in the corporate environment.

The more people who begint to use it, the merrier I get.