Tracy,

I get the distinct impression that the purpose of the article is to sow seeds of doubt (aka: FUD) in the minds of present Windows users.

For example the paragraph:"But IDC's Gillen notes that vast differences between Windows and Linux might create a more costly migration for customers that make that switch. For a similar reason, some IT organizations still employ age-old systems such as OpenVMS, which was developed by now-defunct Digital Equipment, and IBM's OS/400. "Why do people still use these products when there are arguably better alternatives on the market? Because it's cheaper for them to stay put," Gillen says.".
Of course it's easier to stay put on existing bread-and-butter production systems like OpenVMS or AS/400 that are cheap and have been working for years. Y2K showed us all just how many old systems still are in heavy use. But sooner or later people running those systems will face a changeover of some kind, and when they do why should going to Windows be cheaper/easier/faster than going to Linux??? This 'point' has nothing to do with Windows!
I guess he's trying to say that changing from an existing Windows-based infrastructure is the equivalent to changing from OpenVMS or AS/400 to Linux. I can't buy that and I am also reminded that MS wants everyone presently running Windows production applications to eventually 'migrate' to .NET anyway! This is going to happen for free??? I wonder why that is not a factor in this article???

The next paragraph says: "George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner in Stamford, Conn., also warns that although open source may appear free at first glance, customers should be aware of the hidden costs that can arise when they move to a Linux system. Most notable is the cost of porting legacy applications and corporate data to Linux from other operating systems.".
I don't know about the data porting part of this but I doubt that it is an onerous task/cost, overall. As for porting applications, see my comments on the first point. I think that it is also relevant that MS is, for the first time in its history, facing a situation where it wants (needs) its customers to migrate bread-and-butter Windows applications. IBM learned a very tough lesson in this way back in the late sixties and I'm not at all confident that MS' arrogance lets them take any kind of lesson from that. In fact I suspect that this is, by itself, the biggest jeopardy to the success of .NET.

cheers


>Very interesting:
>http://www.infoworld.com/articles/fe/xml/02/08/12/020812feopen.xml