17 companies sue Switzerland over Microsoft contract

[Squilliam]

Soleron said:

Squilliam said:

Soleron said:

kowenicki said:
Now... back in the real world, running a real company (not I.T.) and using real applications that my company uses all the time and are fully compatible with our OS and servers (SBS and exchange), and where our I.T. spend for hardware and software is less than 2% of our turnover (in a company with a 50% profit margin)... why would I bother again???

When XP expires for you, either because MS drops support or you can't physically buy it, I'm saying Linux requires less retraining and has lower costs than upgrading to Vista or later. Is that not important?

Linux isn't free though, its not like these companies were complaining because they didn't have the opportunity to give away something at absolutely no charge with no return to themselves.

It is free if you support it yourself. And governments have a large enough IT staff to be able to do it.

If you want professional support for Linux then you pay Red Hat probably about a tenth of what MS charges for XP and then you get more support than MS gives for that license. But it's entirely optional.

But you couldn't exactly call it a straight up waste of money because they would have to have some personal gain for them to go ahead and sue the government. Also if Linux doesn't support one of the programs they want to run or requires training costs which are greater than the cost of the Windows Licences then they would be better off with Microsoft. Its quite likely that the cost per machine is $25 per year or so, which is probably not even going to pay for even one hour of training in Linux.