Baby Kingdom --a Hong Kong-based online parenting forum as well as a Web development and marketing firm founded in 2002--uses many open-source technologies.

But when it comes to EDM (electronic data marketing), the firm said the open-source EDM software and My SQL posed major problems as its business grew.

"Lack of support is an issue," said founder and operations director Rainer Sip. "We went to [open-source] communities for help but weren't guaranteed solutions to our problems."

"There usually aren't official patches for open-source tools," explained Sip. "We don't want to use unofficial ones for security reasons. We used an older version of MySQL to make sure things work properly--but then we lagged behind in technology."