Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
And as much as I like Linux, how many big financial houses run on it? Does eBay run on it? No, the big operations tend to use Solaris or some other "commercial" Unix, because the quality of the code and service are high and reliability of both code and service are high. Sure, Fidelity or some other big shop could run Linux and maintain their own stable of dedicated support programmers to make sure that bugs that could cost them millions of dollars in down time get fixed and tested and documented instantly, but it costs them less in the long run to buy a service contract with Sun and share the cost of maintaining that cadre of support engineers with other companies in the same business. And honestly, the Red Hat model is pretty much the same these days.
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You would be surprised at how many commercial organizations run the free *NIXs. yahoo and Google for 2 of them. Most big companies are going to want some sort of support contract- and they have several to choose from in the Liniux world.
This is what the open source visionaries have been saying for a long time- there are ways to make money from open source software. Even Sun offers people the source code for Solaris these days.
And take OpenBSD, which I have used for the basis of several firewalls- I don't think you can find a more secure operating system. Not all software will become open source or free, but the most widely used programs will. Ancd some companies will make a ton of money in the niche software markets. Do you think M$ put anywhere near $200 million in R&D for halo 3? I don't- but this is what they have raked in in less than a month of sales.