Although the open source software is free, the adoption of open source software is painfully slow and as a business owner you will find it quite intimidating to even get to choose any particular software. Below we have compiled a few reasons why off-the-shelf open source software may not work for your business:

Lack of compatible applications
Open source applications are often written by individual developers who have business knowledge in specialized domain only Operating System, Database, Content Management, eCommerce or Customer Relationship Management. These applications are written independently and hence they do not integrate well with each other. For example, your company may be requiring a Shopping cart, a CRM and a Visitor Forum but there is no single product that will meet your needs and integrating three different applications to work together will need deep understanding of source code of all three applications. If your organization is already using an open source product then finding compatible applications will be a tough job!

Lack of training and support
Open Source applications are written by technical people and there are no training manuals for a large number of applications. Moreover, getting help from the developers can sometimes be difficult as the support is primarily aimed at developers and non end business users.

Less user friendly
The open source applications tend to be less user friendly. The GUI of most applications is not good when compared to commercial products. Again the reason for this is very simple, these applications are not intended for non-technical people.

No warranty
No open source applications come with any warranty as regard to the correctness of its functionalities. Hence, you cannot rely on any one for validating or fixing anything that seems to be working incorrectly.