... Management types like *business* reasons. So here is what I tell people. The fundamental difference between proprietary software and Linux is not whether people pay but rather who pays for what when. Microsoft pays developers to build software and absorbs all of the costs themselves. They then charge license fees to recoup those costs and make a profit. Open Source software costs money at the development stage too, but only the people or businesses that need those changes enough to pay for them must do so. Consequently the difference is that open source software spreads the cost of development around up front on an on-demand basis, while Microsoft charges in arrears and must control certain aspects of the use of that software to make money. As a result, moving to Microsoft software would require: 1) paying license fees 2) paying someone to track software licenses 3) a move from a solid, peer-reviewed codebase where users and developers actually talk to eachother to one where marketing runs everything. 4) scrapping all existing code and building everything from scratch. 5) The loss of a large measure of control over your own existing infrastructure. Furthermore, Microsoft tech support is pretty much worthless these days. Additional points the management should consider if there are concerns about Linux: 1) IBM is far larger than Microsoft and is putting substantial development effort into Linux. Linux is no longer the hobbiest operating system and there are a lot of people working on making it work well on high-end hardware. 2) If .Net is desired, it may be better to focus on Mono instead. Mono is compatible in most cases with .Net (and will run even some Microsoft .Net tools like WIX), and it is fully cross-platform unlike .Net. If you write Mono code, you will be able to run it on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, but if you write .Net code, you may not. ... http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/05/130233