Related to Sheridan's post, I'm in the middle of a cost analysis for my own networks. I'm curious to see what the price would be if I were using commercial products (aka non-open source).
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As usual, some very thoughtful comments. Your consideration of contributing factors to cost are what I would consider as hard components. There are a number of soft components that are typically ignored in these analysis (generally because they are difficult to quantify).
(Before I get irate replies from the masses, I support both Linux and Open Source.) These are some of the drawbacks that I need to consider when making decisions. On the server side, there are few issues as there are established standards and protocols -- it matters not to the end users or the rest of the organization on what products are in use. What matters generally is efficiency, effectiveness, security, initial cost, implementation cost, maintenance costs, training (capability, competence and availability of supplemental resources), vendor response, etc (I likely have missed some important items). When considering these factors, Linux and some Open Source generally wins. In the world of Floss which I include Linux distros, there are many choices but these choices come with a price. I find that consultants in the Floss word need to be (and generally are) more knowledgeable, skilled and competent than in the Windows world.
On the application and/or desktop side, the story is different. One of the biggest item concerns is the flow of information and documents both inside the organization and outside. The world of Floss would be find is I were the sole producer of documents and the consumers were happy being limited to pdf files. If the consumer of the information that I produce do not need to add, delete or edit the information I supply to produce another document, floss works fine. Within an organization, if there are applications standards floss will also work very well. Unfortunately this breaks down when we need to exchange documents with other organizations. There is no software out there that will read every format and even when they attempt to, there is limited success for some formats. Our best success would be to assess what format is the most popular (not necessary the best) for a specific application and is there a floss application that is equivalent. The best examples of this would be Open Office. While I would not hesitate to recommend it to most people there are a couple of caveats. At this point in time, this Floss application is comparable to MS Office but it has not always been that way in the pass and may not be in the future. Secondly, as the average person only uses 5% of the features (or likely less than that), Open Office is more than adequate, however for a very advance user or complex documents, there are considerable incompatibilities between the two products. As you can see the cost can be huge for some but no consideration required for others.
The old adage, "No one got fired for buying IBM" is still very much alive in the software world. In general, if you by what is popular and is viewed to be tried and true, you can't really get into much trouble even when the solution does not work.
Just my .02
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