plemen- tation projects. It is true that regularly engaging in wholesale rewriting of code to please the particular desires of a telco offers a revenue stream for OSS vendors. However, in the long run, an OSS vendor can gain much more market share by purely selling software licences. To be able to do this, programmability and cus- tomisability must be built in to the software. By this point, the reader may have noticed that the Clarity Service Manager is doing nothing but implementing in software each step of the operations of a telecom service provider. In other words, OSS implement in software business processes. To the extent that OSS software does this, it automates business processes. A cynic might ask, "So how much value does an OSS actually add, if it simply transfers to software what the service provider already did without software?" This brings us to a crux of the business case for OSS software. The answer is no different from the answer to the same question about word pro- cessing software: "How much value does MS Word add when all it does is enable us to write, when we were able to write long before Wordstar or other ancient word processing software was marketed?" Although we might mostly choose to do with software precisely what we did without it, we can do it much more efficiently, we can automate certain tedious aspects of tasks, we can share information more easily, we can avoid errors, we can integrate separate processes by transferring information electronically, and so on. The question of whether spreadsheet software has made accountants' lives easier is readily answered. Using spreadsheet software, it is simple to perform tasks that accountants did before PCs came along. However, spreadsheet software also allows accountants to do things that were previously nearly impos- sible, such as "What if" scenarios, which, before spreadsheet software, would only have been able to be performed by people who would have been regarded as accounting geniuses. Because such a task requires rare skills in human