Not that the issues in making open source work are all that esoteric. "There is nothing that gets delivered that just plugs in and everything is beautiful," says Josh Levine, chief technology officer of E-Trade Financial in Menlo Park, Calif. "So you need people who know the technology." Like Wojciechowski's prodigy.

"There's a little more onus on your IT people to reach out and provide answers rather than going back to a vendor and asking for a patch," says Harry Roberts, senior vice president and CIO of Reading, Pa.-based retailer Boscov's, which moved a legacy invoice processing app to Linux on its IBM mainframe. "But they like the new way," Roberts continues. "They don't want to wait weeks or months for solutions to come from the vendor. They want to get things done quickly."

Indeed, Roberts says his staff ported the old invoice processing app over to Linux in 45 days. Not bad, he says, considering that "it had a lot of functions and touchpoints with other systems like ERP and a rigorous online and batch cycle. We said, If we can make this work, we can make anything else work." Roberts ran the new application in a parallel environment with the mainframe system to work out bugs for four months before going live. "That was six months ago," he says, "and we haven't had a failure yet."

Design Your Own Desktop

David Chugg had a dream. He wanted to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the Windows desktop.

Chugg's not a Justice Department lawyer, nor does he have a particular beef with Microsoft. It's just that he didn't want reservations agents at the 6,600 hotels that are franchises of his company, New York City-based Cendant, to be surfing the Internet when they should be taking care of guests.