I was actually an IT intern at a billing service and we had several new servers come in. I was there early (by about 4 hours) before the other 3 IT people came in and simply set up a Linux server to try and show them that it worked great (instead of paying Microsoft for the server software).

Turns out after showing them they liked it and they are currently running the Linux servers. Windows machines are used throughout the company for the regular users, but Linux for their servers storing all the patient information files, user data, etc. After spending about 3 months as an intern I essentially taught the Microsoft certified staff enough to manage the servers well enough (it's really not all that hard) and they still have them running (roughly a year later).

Point is, you really don't need highly skilled technicians, none of them had used Linux before my internship, yet all of them still seem to run the servers fine. One REALLY nice thing is that their Linux servers go down far less, are quicker, and are actually more secure than their old Windows 2000 servers they were running.

For the past few months, I have been using Windows at work (MS shop) after a long hiatus from Redmond's OS. I used to be a full-time Linux user and then moved to OS X.

Recently, I had to set up a development environment for ASP.Net development and was taken aback by the sheer amount of things I needed to install and knobs I had to turn to get it working. I've never had so much trouble on Linux nor OS X.

The same is true for getting a working build environment for our main product (CPython-based). I find Windows to be quite hostile to non-VS environments.

It's time to retire ye olde Linux-is-complex argument. It really does not hold up to scrutiny. I say this as someone that uses Windows 5/7 days and OS X 7/7 days, so I'm at least a little bit informed about the OSes.

I think it's the other way around if a protect has less than 100 servers MS may be cheaper if you have 10,000 then Linux is probably cheaper.

The problem is that some of MS products have really nonsense license costs. I just say: MSQL server.

Compared to MySQL, sure. But that's like comparing a spade to digger: both can make a hole in the ground, but you'll want the digger to do some real work.

It doesn't compare as well to Postgres - but the better tooling may well make it worth the $10k in licence fees. That's a month of engineer time in maintenance.

SQL Server's cheap for what you get when compared to the commercial competition. Informix is pretty much dead (and had horrible tooling). Oracle is even more expensive. And compared to Oracle, Microsoft look like angels. Ingres is a bit of a joke.

The big expensive MSSQL licences also include some pretty nifty BI tools, including decent implementations of data mining algorithms.

The licensing cost for SQL Server have increased over the years and limiting some of security features to the top tier sucks ass in this environment, but the training, documentation, knowledge sharing and community is better than any other technical community, closed or open sourced that I have found.

I would think that Linux financially scales better than Windows, which is why Windows Server + SQL is shrinking while Linux server is growing, and now Linux is the world's most popular system for servers, especially for highest-traffic sites.

>Ford scales, Ferrari doesn't.

In server markets Linux + Unix have roughly 65% market penetration and it's growing.

Windows Server has 35% and it's shrinking.