That's not necessarily a feature or virtue of open source vs. windows; it's a feature of the network effects that make windows a much more rational (business-wise, at least) platform to develop on. There is a barrier, however, between customers that want unix and those that can tolerate windows and I'll comment on that below.
> M$ is always going to be around for the average consumer who doesn't want
> to spend the time or effort to run a more complex operating system. The
I do wonder about that - I wonder how much MSFT cash is coming out of the consumer market, and how much is out of selling development tools, professional tools like MS Project (which is damn useful, IMHO), databases and server software, education and consulting. What I do see is that most prominent and successful MS software is on the desktop. Perhaps someone on LBO-Talk knows how this breaks down.
> FUD M$ is sowing is not because they suddenly think all AOL users are
> going to dump Windoze and go to linux, but because they now realise linux
> is replacing M$ in the enterprise data center. Hardware cost are the
Linux (qua linux) and NT are essentially going for the same niche - the lightweight server niche. MSFT never really developed confidence among the big iron crowd, which is much more sensitive to risk than the light iron or the consumer desktop crowd. Most technical people are dragged into using MS platforms because of the same network effects that make it a good target platform for application development.
However, a Linux application is generally portable upwards - you can do your initial development and unit testing and fairly easily port upwards to an enterprise-level server running a unix or unix-like OS (HPUX, Solaris, Digital Unix or whatever they call it now). That's doubly true if you're developing an application on top of middleware rather than coding an application from scratch.
What I've noticed, in my capacity as a consultant, is an increasingly sharp line between clients who want to/need to use NT/2k and those who want a unix system. That is the user's sensitivity to application downtime. People who are building a system that can't tolerate a lot of downtime (e-commerce, b2b, any kind of transactional system, really) are the ones who request unix, or have unix-based components in their system (application running on NT, but RDBMS running on a unix platform).
Internal projects, ones that are created for learning purposes or for possible eventual sale to client, are also increasingly unix-based. That application software for linux is occasionally much much cheaper than that for NT (take DB2 pricing for an IBM VAR - I think it's 15x more expensive to buy DB2 for an NT box of equivalent size) It's a bit of a transition for most of the staff. But the writing is on the wall; a consultancy wanting to bring down the big game has to get used to using the big guns.
> dc-stuff (which is a "social" list). Geeks also tend to get annoyed at
> questions that display laziness, rather than just ignorance. If a person
*snarf* I couldn't have said that better myself.
Marco
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> Marco Anglesio | I fancied you'd return the way you said, <
> mpa at the-wire.com | But I grow old and I forget your name. <
> http://www.the-wire.com/~mpa | (I think I made you up inside my head.) <
> | --Sylvia Plath <
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