[ Thanks to Lin Kuei
for this link. ]
“Texas Tech University first tried Linux in 1998 when it needed
a flexible operating system that could run Oracle underneath the
school’s RaiderLink intranet site for students, staff, and
visitors. Brandon LaBonte, the university’s director of software
development, wanted to migrate the data that fed the intranet site
off a Microsoft SQL database and onto Oracle 8i, which he perceived
as more flexible. ‘We didn’t have the budget to invest in
proprietary hardware for the Oracle database,’ he says. So the
university tried Linux on Intel-based servers.“Linux’s worldwide support network of programmers and IT
professionals mitigated some of the operating system’s risks and
helped keep costs down. ‘If there’s a problem, the answer is
somewhere out there,’ LaBonte says. ‘There are lots of eyes on the
code. The fixes are there, and they’re free…'”