In the real world, the majority of companies do not care if they have to spend thousands or hundreds of thousands on a support contract or licensed piece of software. Why? Because the majority of the time they just work. You don't need a developer to plough through source code to fix a bug, you don't have to rush through forums looking for a solution when dealing with a Sev 1, nor dealing with overly buggy software. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but I feel as if each operating system has its own strengths and weaknesses. I would deploy a LAMP webserver anyday before IIS/Windows/ASP, but on the other hand there is nothing in the Linux world that compares to what Microsoft did with Active Directory. I would not trust my banking information being stored in a MySQL database (nor MS SQL), but Oracle or DB2 I'd have no problems with.

Linux is not ready for the desktop. I have a machine that runs Ubuntu, an OpenBSD machine, an iMac and a Vista laptop. Each has their own strong points and weak points. I never suggest my mother run Ubuntu...Why? Because I doubt she wants to edit a text file to have an application function correctly, nor compile drivers from C source code just to get wireless working. Why do you think Linux is being removed from a lot of Netbooks these days? Because a lot of things JUST DO NOT work. At least with an XP install out of the box everything will work and you don't have to recompile drivers or execute 3 line commands every few days to reinitialize your wireless.

If you take a look at why businesses use licensed software it is because it just works. Linux does too, but in a lot of cases after tinkering for hours on end. Open source software may be free, but in a lot of cases the TCO adds up to be significantly more in the long run. That being said I have worked in IT for over 10 years, managed Windows, IBM AIX, Linux and VMS.

I agree with you Linux does run better than any version of Windows, but most people wouldn't have thee slightest clue where to start. Ubuntu is a great operating system and runs like a dream on my laptop, but I had to fiddle with Madwifi drivers for 2-3 hours to get my wireless working properly. I have been using Linux off and on since 1997 so I do have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. I can't imagine my computer illiterate girlfriend or father ever figuring out how to do it. I've walked people through Microsoft driver installs in 5 minutes over the phone. Linux drivers not so easy. Most people don't really care what they're running. Sure there are a small percentage of us that do run Linux, but for the average person as long as they can do what they want, IE. check e-mail, surf the internet, and watch the odd video they're happy. They don't want to try to find the right codecs/media player on Ubuntu for 6 hours to come up with a choppy video, or one that won't play. I convinced my neighbor to install Ubuntu. After 4 days he asked me what kind of crap I was giving to him and switched back to XP. Why? Although Ubuntu is leaps and bounds easier to use than past distributions a lot of things are still very complicated. Synaptic is very to use for example, but try explaining sudo to the majority of people. Most people aren't as computer literate as us, nor will they ever be. People just want things to work and unfortunately with Linux most of the time there is some work to be done to get the most basic things operational.