Why people don't adopt FLOSS

I'm in a rush to finish a lot of things at work and am working on a longer post about incorporating systems analysis in emergency management so for now I'm going to quote a large portion of text from the Confused of Calcutta blog entitled "Learning about why people don't adopt open source". I think the post nails the problem on the head.

1. They hate the principle. Such people are uncomfortable with the concept of opensource, they tend to get hung up with the free-as-in-gratis rather than the free-as-in-freedom, and they feel that somehow the very nature of their existence gets undermined by the use of opensource. It’s unAmerican, it’s McCarthyist, it’s even (hush your mouth) Communist. And don’t you know it’s already illegal in Alaska? Where will the world go to if everyone started using free things? Opensource users are stealing from the mouths of people who work hard everywhere. The very idea! These people are hard to convince, but when convinced experience Road-To-Damascus moments. Work on them, it will pay off.
2. They believe it’s insecure. [Again, a wonderful feat of marketing, excellent management of the metaphors and anchors and frames around opensource.] Quite a common response. Code that everyone can use, that anyone can change, that no one owns? Open to inspection by all? How on earth could that possibly be secure? It’s all a plot to bring down the capitalist world as we know knew it. Solvable by education.
3. They’re out of their comfort zone. This tends to be the response of steady-state professionals in IT departments in many organisations. If it works, why try and fix it? Why force yourself to take responsibility for the integration, deployment and support of something, when you can pay someone else to take care of it all? They’re risk-averse and responsibility-shy; understandable, defensible, this can often be solved by education.
4. They know a better way. These are people who point to the end-to-end control that Apple/Microsoft has, and how that gives people more choice and a better experience. [Yes, I've always wanted to drive my car on railtracks, ensure that the wheels fit precisely on the tracks, and go by car only to the places the railway takes me. ?!?] Solvable by education.
5. They don’t know about it. These people have been cocooned away so effectively that they aren’t even aware of the options they have. Totalitarian rule. Most probably they aren’t allowed to go on to that dangerous place, the internet, where they might see strange places and maybe even catch exotic diseases. If they do have connectivity, it’s locked down to a small number of cleared sites. Mozilla is definitely not one of them, and even Sun is banned. Solvable by education.
6. They can’t do what they want with it. To me, this is one of the most understandable objections. They use something that’s proprietary, they’ve built a whole pile of things around the proprietary thing, and now they can’t function without it. It’s hard to replicate elsewhere or using anything else. It’s not just the applications, you have to think about the processes, the training, everything. I almost buy this. Almost. But all you need to do is imagine you are in a merger or takeover, and all this changes. There is an imperative to move, and all the excuses disappear. So while I have sympathy for this view, I am aware of how fragile it really is. The best way to solve this one is to simulate a merger or takeover involving a firm that does not use what you’re using.
7. The move represents serious operational risk. Puh-leese. Find the remaining deckchairs on the Titanic, and get them on it. They will happily move them around until iceberg time.