Thanks to John O’Donnell
for this link.
“For companies that are used to working with Windows NT, that
kind of reliability can be a real eye-opener, says Buck Fleming,
president of LinuxForce Inc. in Lansdowne.”
“That was the case at the Delaware County Daily Times, where
Fleming’s company installed a system running Windows NT to put the
newspaper’s classified ads onto the Web in 1996. “Every week,
something was wrong with the system, and somebody had to go there
and fix it,” said Fleming. “I used to get calls regularly in the
middle of the night. It drove me crazy.”
“Chris Fearnley, the head of the Philadelphia Linux User Group
and now LinuxForce’s senior vice president of technology, suggested
replacing Windows NT with Linux. For a year, Fleming resisted the
idea. “If it’s free, how good could it be?” Fleming recalls
thinking. “It was too wild for me to even consider.”
“In late 1997, Fleming gave in, and replaced the $62,000 Windows
NT server at the Daily Times with a $1,200 Linux system. The Linux
system proceeded to run without interruption for the next year –
357 days, to be exact – until it was taken down for an
upgrade.”