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There's also the issue of the vendor having effective control of the legacy system. When IBM is the only one with expertise to actually change your 30-year-old mainframe setup (as opposed to just keeping it running) they have a lot of leverage over any transition process. "Nice database you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it" ends up being the implicit scenario.

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That's an excellent point! And one I forgot to make. It's a pretty sweet scam if you're a vendor.

I've been in situations where critical system changes to support new products were being described in Business Requirement documents, sent to the vendor for translation to Technical Requirement documents, returned to the client for approval, and then scheduled for implementation at some point usually 6 months beyond the original requirements process completion.

Could this be why there are NO widely used open source business systems in the financial services, heath care, and banking industries?

It's not widely used but the investment bank I used to work at open-sourced some of their work. They figured they could get more eyes on the code and find issues with it faster.

https://www.openadaptor.org/

source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/57362/Open_source_bre...

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