One of your key system daemons has just crashed (SEGFAULT). Restarting it causes yet another crash; what do you do? If you know C coding, you start doing stack traces. If you have a support contract, you call them up. If you have neither C skills or a support contract, you hope like hell that Google can help you. If not, you're reliant on someone on a webforum/mailing list helping you out, possibly including handholding on "how to run a debugger on a core file".
I don't care whether it's 1993 or 2011, the fact is if something goes wrong, you need someone who can investigate, find root cause and recommend a fix. That pretty much has to be a skilled internal admin with C skills or a 3rd party support contract.
It's easy to maintain an OS (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, whatever) when things are working, the problem is what you do when things go wrong. That's when you need the support.
If you have a technically skilled support team who are willing and able to get into a bit of C coding, the "free" linux distros are viable. If your support staff are pure admins and don't do C coding much/at all, they'll struggle to maintain Linux without someone like Redhat backing them up.
Also, it depends on the app - if it can fall over for 2 days at a time without much of an issue, who cares about support? If an hour of downtime is a big issue, you need someone who is able to fix it Right Now (TM). If your local team is good enough, that's fine, but mailing list/forum support of free software is down to the goodwill of the community. They don't care if your app is down, they have day jobs and social lives as well. With Redhat, you can get someone on the end of the phone 24x7.
On another note, I like the look of the portrait oriented monitor. It looks to be so much better suited to documents, and probably coding, than the mostly landscape orientations that came later.
I suspect you can blame the early cinema pioneers for that... they decided on a "landscape" format for movies which then became the standard for Television sets. In the 80s, most home computers (Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad 64 and even the Atari ST & Amiga) used the TV as a monitor so a generation of kids grew up assuming monitors must be in portrait layout.
But no. Sony have to come up with their MMC cards, complete incompatible with everything else so you can't share them between devices. And, of course, there's only really one supplier. This was entirely what stopped me getting a Sony Walkman phone.
And then there's UMD - crap design as it's easy to get your fingers on the disc. And, of course, they rendered all the UMD disks unusable on the newer PSPs, although getting rid of it was probably a blessing.
Dropping linux support on the PSP3 was a slap in the face for customers, just because they'd screwed up their design and realised that the bits of code which let people run linux allowed them to hack the box.
Side note - slight irony in the fact the favicon for the website is the (now obsolete) Sun logo on an MS patent
Sun at least had a fairly solid server business which kept them going for a while; SGI servers were generally only used in places with a strong presence of SGIs on the desktop.
SGI also had some classics - "XFS is great, it'll never need to be fsck'd!" Few months later, the fsck for xfs was released... It was, in general, a good OS with some odd quirks as I recall.
Patent trolls exploit the fact it's cheaper to roll over & pay the fee than it is to fight, where if you win, you lose.
I'm looking at a laptop upgrade now (old one is 6 years old and creaking...) which will end up running Windows 7 as there's little reason not to get it.
"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_