Thousands of extremely useful open source applications and utilities are available free under different licenses. These range from, among others, anti-spyware, audio, operating systems, educational software, business applications and programming utilities. After many studies on the subject concerning open source software (OSS), several authors have bluntly concluded that OSS is actually better than its proprietary counterpart. This assertion may not be true for developing countries such as Botswana. A necessary precondition for OSS adoption is knowledge for open source. To this effect, this article analyses the extent to which companies in Botswana have embraced the OSS initiative as alternative to proprietary software. The question is:“Do they have enough knowledge of OSS products availability?” Data were collected from 62 small organizations that engage in some form of information technology (IT) in their daily operations and analyzed using simple descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation. The findings indicate some three important aspects:(1) all organizations employ many forms of IT to a great extent coupled with a negligible OSS component;(2) organizations have invested a lot of capital into their current IT systems and therefore regard OSS as an inferior and ineffective alternative compared to the licensed software that they use;(3) although IT professionals have abundant knowledge of OSS products, they perceive that the power to switch from proprietary to OSS solely rested with the company owners and their top management.