Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1

geekinexile writes "Bloomberg is running this Microsoft vs. Linux article as a top story on the Bloomberg system. Not so notable for what it says about Linux, but rather for the fact that the financial community is starting to actually get open source."

Comments

For those who don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

this story is not only on Bloomberg's website. It is on the Bloomberg system as one of the top stories when you do news research on Microsoft.

Yes and no. It may be cheaper if you're an MS shop

[BoomerSooner]

Like my company was. However that being said, what got me to finally breakdown and switch to Linux/Solaris wasn't the Nonexistent Security, Monopoly, the consistant Patches, the piss poor support or even the high cost. It was when trying to get my Exchange Server back up after it crashed for no apparent reason a book I was reading for help in running Exchange said:
"It is often preferable to simply backup you Exchange Server Data and reinstall, instead of trying to find the one hidden setting that is causing the error in your configuration."

That almost made me fall over in my chair.

From that day on I decided on a course for MS freedom. We now run Apache/Tomcat for our JSP server, MySQL for our DB Backend (until migration to Oracle is complete), and QMail/Horde/IMP for mail. It took a little time but saved around $6000 in software licensing costs and $5000 in new hardware that would have needed to be purchased.

So in the end I could deal with all the MS shit until the UI for managing Exchange got so bad it no longer became worth it to run MS on the server side. It was the best IT decision I've made (IMHO).

Re:Of course not...

[Tim Macinta]

Would you talk negatively about your own company?

While this was modded up as funny (and is indeed funny), there is more than a bit of truth to this. CNet just so happens to be running a four part series on Microsoft's biggest vulnerabilities. On day one they wrote about open source. Today they wrote about Microsoft being its own worst enemy. You can check out all four articles here.