I've heard that Ubuntu server is actually gaining some traction in terms of business adoption. I think the "standard" is still Red Hat / CentOS, but I was surprised to hear that Ubuntu Server is taken seriously.

I do agree with this. On one of the products that I had once supported, it was fairly impressive when it worked. Unfortunately, it didn't quite scale well particularly with the largest clients. There were a bunch of moving parts of the product, some open-source, some propriety and often an issue is from one part of the chain not responding well to the load. But, it was absolutely clear that there was an obvious market for this kind of product. Perusing various documents, images, spreadsheets, audio / video files sucked in from hard drives is an enormous data mine for law enforcement, intelligence gathering and legal matters.

as a former autonomy employee who worked with the introspect product, I find this very ironic. No doubt some of the current folks that maintain the Introspect product are getting a kick of reading emails of former and perhaps even current executives.

My feelings exactly. I used to work with a guy who liked to work with gentoo. It took him a couple of days for everything to compile and get a working laptop, but if he feels that gentoo is best for his productivity, I have nothing against it. For myself, I have used a variety of desktop level operating systems, and after a while these fights that come along between the operating systems just seem comical. The author of the original article even felt guilty of using Mac OS X ! If there are things to feel "traitorous" about, it isn't about what OS to use. And I agree that that there are many standards that cross-over the multiple operating systems. samba / windows file sharing, even NTFS is inter-operable between Linux and Windows, PDFs, etc. This isn't like the days of Apple and AppleTalk.