[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“Under the guise of reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) in a
tough economic environment, technical staffs are recommending
replacement of Windows with Linux on their servers.“This is based on the flawed assumption that because Linux is
‘free’ it will reduce TCO. On closer inspection, it appears the
recommendation is more an emotionally driven reaction against
Microsoft than a factual case for Linux. Astute IT organizations
will recognize that Linux’s true value is derived more from the
price/performance of the commodity Intel hardware it enables than
from its open source characteristics.“With highly distributed n-tier (DBMS, application, and Web)
server architectures commoditizing during 2002-04, Unix (other than
Solaris) will recede to high-end, low-volume, niche-platform status
by 2005/06. Windows will increasingly dominate for midtier
application servers (2002-04), due to growing ISV reference
platform momentum, and be a suitable DBMS server for more than 90
percent of application requirements. Linux on Intel (‘Lintel’) will
be a successful high-volume Web, technical computing, and appliance
server OS, but enterprise application package (2003/04) and DBMS
(2005/06) server penetration will be slower. Linux software and
services prices will increase to about 10 to 20 percent less than
those of Windows by 2004/05…”