Abstract Interest has been raised over software that has been developed not by dedicated software companies but by groups of independent programmers with different level of experience who collaborate over the Internet and offer the fruits of their labor free. Open source software communities have successfully developed many software pieces and suggest Free Open Source Software (FOSS) as a solution for a lot of computing problems, although most computer users only use proprietary applications. Many proprietary software users claim that open source software invites problems, such as, generating software codes that could be vulnerable to hackers and prone to errors. This paper presents an overview of the real issues and challenges for the migration to free and open source software (FOSS) and suggests some important criteria for assessing migration issues and challenges. Migratory problems may be divided into technical and nontechnical issues and challenges. The technical issues and challenges include performance, technical infrastructure, usability, integrity, support availability, security, information flow control, data migration, flexibility and ease of use and management and maintenance of OSS, whereas the non-technical issues and challenges include organizational culture, human factors (staff skills) and legal issues
