"This started out when a co-worker needed to return a loaner server and needed to
replace it with another box. It needed to be a drop in replacement, with all it's
functions intact. The current OS was SCO UnixWare, and while it's a good stable
OS, I thought it was prudent to check out other alternitives. One obvious choice
was Linux, and as it turned out, it was perhaps the best, but not the only choice to
replace this stalwart Intel Unix OS. I had less than a month to do it."
"Linux (namely RedHat 6.1) offered most of the above features and was very
comparable on all counts. Advanced features like fail-over clusters, scalability, ect.
were all available in the RedHat advanced package along with Sendmail, Apache,
and other features like PAM autentication, SSL encryption, clustering, LDAP, 5
nines uptimes, ect. I had used Linux 5.x and 6.0 at home and felt 6.1 was Way
Better than the older versions."
"In the end the difference came down to application support. Linux won that
hands-down. The recent rash of Linux publicity has sparked a fresh wave of
application developers and software companies of all stripes to port their legacy
applications to Linux. It seems to have won that battle, as all of the code can be
tuned to any specific platform, with little or no regard for restictive licencing
provisions."
