"Cost" is very tricky.  My thesis was on the Total Cost of Ownership 
for Workgroup Servers, and the O/S cost is irrelevant.  Labor costs
for NT are less than Unix/Linux, but downtime costs (also known as
opportunity costs) are much higher for NT, especially as workgroup
size increases.

For very small workgroups, NT is a good choice for TCO.  You start
losing money with NT after the workgroup exceeds about 10-12 people
(based on 1999 prices).

George


"David P. Schwartz" wrote:
> 
> Hmm, if 20% of ALL servers are running Brand X, and over 50% of the insurance company's customers are also using Brand X, that implies
> some interesting things about what their customers think of Brand X products and their own business intelligence!  eg, they're more
> afraid of losing their money than losing their data and inconveniencing THEIR own customers . . .  And the spokespeople for Brand X are
> making a big deal telling folks that it's somehow more dangerous to use another Brand of software???  That's a very confusing way of
> explaining why the majority of parties seeking "business interruption" insurance account for only a small fraction of the servers in the
> market, but whom also happen to be using Brand X software (that is susceptible to a higher incidence of security leaks than other
> options that don't cost nearly as much). . .
> 
> Maybe we need a law that requires hostmasters to report security breeches and a way to penalize the companies running the servers by
> adding "points" to their insurance that boost premiums.  Wouldn't it be interesting if the premiums for "free" Open-Source software were
> normally a fraction of the cost of Brand X software?
> 
> Alan Dayley wrote:
> 
> > 20.64% as of April 2001 (source: http://www.netcraft.net/survey/)
> >
> > Alan
> >
> 
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