I know you're expecting a flame for your comments, but I still disagree with some of what you're saying.
I work in a shop that has used several flavors of Unix and Windows mixed. The management, for some reason, would love to pay all their money to Microsoft, and replace all of the Unix/Linux boxes with Windows NT/2000/whatever.
Articles like this (and the one from a few months ago claiming insurers charge more for insuring Windows over Unix) are valuable because my boss can take these to his boss to help justify our using Linux in the backroom and in several of the labs.
In our shop, we build our own machines, and maintain at least 150 at any given time. Most of them are running Linux.
Whenever a new major distro comes out, my boss and I will buy it. And if we see some neat software package come out that is written for Linux (Civilization, BRU, etc), we'll buy that too. If the local computer shops see that people are buying Linux stuff, they are far more likely to keep getting new stuff.
Sure, we can just download the latest from whichever distribution, but it really doesn't hurt us to spend $50/year on a new one, and it's a way of showing "commercial" support for Linux.
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I know you're expecting a flame for your comments, but I still disagree with some of what you're saying. I work in a shop that has used several flavors of Unix and Windows mixed. The management, for some reason, would love to pay all their money to Microsoft, and replace all of the Unix/Linux boxes with Windows NT/2000/whatever. Articles like this (and the one from a few months ago claiming insurers charge more for insuring Windows over Unix) are valuable because my boss can take these to his boss to help justify our using Linux in the backroom and in several of the labs.
Whenever a new major distro comes out, my boss and I will buy it. And if we see some neat software package come out that is written for Linux (Civilization, BRU, etc), we'll buy that too. If the local computer shops see that people are buying Linux stuff, they are far more likely to keep getting new stuff.
Sure, we can just download the latest from whichever distribution, but it really doesn't hurt us to spend $50/year on a new one, and it's a way of showing "commercial" support for Linux.