From: adam flinton 

btw this is humorous:

"Flessner acknowledged almost every enterprise has deployed some
Linux. "We're seeing it in commodity workloads, low-value Web servers
like Apache, for instance. We've seen it in devices, gateways, security,
stuff like that," he said. "And you know what? Good for them. It
puts the competition in there and makes us really focus on total cost of
ownership. But sophisticated customers are not fooled by a price of
zero.""

But I thought it was a threat to "high end proprietary unix"?

So if I've got MS'es story right then linux is to be found/taking market
share in big machine scenarios (e.g. vs Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) & in
"almost every enterprise has deployed some Linux. "We're seeing
it in commodity workloads, low-value Web servers like Apache, for instance.
We've seen it in devices, gateways, security, stuff like that," he
said. "

& this is fun:

  "And you know what? Good for them. It puts the competition in there
and makes us really focus on total cost of ownership. But sophisticated
customers are not fooled by a price of zero."

So they're used to paying for AIX, Solaris, HP-UX & other big system
unixes (e.g. Dec True64, Irix etc) ....which they're replacing with linux
often with big tech comp help (HP/IBM)....so they are abviously already
aware of "nothing comes for free" in business.

BTW why wouldn't this be possible:

"Nathan Hanks, managing director of technology for Continental
Airlines Inc., said his concern is making sure that he can turn the Houston
company's airplanes around as quickly as possible. As such, the
open-source-community concept is not as appealing to him. When the SQL
Slammer worm hit earlier this year, Microsoft responded immediately and
addressed the issue. Its executives also visited him to discuss the matter.
This would not be possible in the open-source world, Hanks said."

If the company already knows nothing comes for free then....no reason why
MySQL or PostGreSQL or Firebird/Interbase can't have "paid for"
developers. The JBoss people get paid....

Oh & why wouldn't Oracle or IBM with DB2 be able to provide that level
of support if running on Linux/BSD?

Adam


Joe Barr wrote:
> http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1121581,00.asp
>
> June 9, 2003
> Microsoft Feels the Linux Heat
> By Peter Galli
>

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