“When Brett Thomas, technology vice-president for online music
retailer Goodnoise.com, set up a server at a local Internet service
provider last May, his contact at the ISP asked for Thomas’ pager
number so he could be contacted when the machine crashed. The
assumption was that Goodnoise would be running Microsoft’s Windows
NT operating system on the server, which stood to get some heavy
loads as surfers downloaded music files in the popular MP3 format.
But when Thomas told the contact that Goodnoise was using the Linux
operating system, he replied: “If you’re using Linux, I don’t need
a pager number.”
“Thomas gave him the number anyway. But he says Goodnoise hasn’t
yet suffered a software-related crash even though its traffic has
increased dramatically since the deal was done….”
“Thomas isn’t alone. Information managers throughout the
corporate world are discovering that Linux is a viable challenger
that often outperforms Microsoft’s NT operating system and other
versions of Unix — at a fraction of the cost…”