[mdlug] Linux push an economic phenomanon?

[Aaron Kulkis]

Art Dries wrote:
> I'm trying 2 reason out how this grassroots effort is considered mainstream now. Could it be that a slow economy, increasing cost of propriatary software, and an abundance of cheap hardware made it an obvious choice? Or is there a less cynical reason?
> 

Art -- It started thusly, in the late 90's:

On comp.os.linux.advocacy and other places, I and others frequently
urged administrators who were plagued with IIS problems to just
silently replace the Windows+IIS installations with Linux+Apache.

Nobody would notice the downtime from the installation because
the Windows/IIS stack was such a buggy mess that it was crashing
all the time -- that in fact, the only thing which WOULD cause
upper management to notice a change would be the fact that the
doggone things were NOT crashing frequently.

At which point, when asked "What did you do to fix the web
server(s)?", the answer "I replaced it with Linux & Apache" would
NOT get you fired.  What managers would DEMAND a systems admin
re-install Windows?  Only those whom would soon find themselves
out on the street looking for a new job once the full story
(complete with consequences) became known to his or her superiors.

This was the path to getting the foot in the door, as this
was, at the time, where hands down, Linux was clearly THE
SUPERIOR CHOICE for the job -- the same reliability as a
$XX,000 Unix server, and far better reliability than an
$X,000 Windows + IIS licenses which would no longer need
to be renewed.  And no amount of politicking by the MS-droids
and outright plants (oh, your licenses aren't in order --
instead of running you out of business, we'll let you stay
in business, BUT you have to install the following cronies
onto your board of directors and/or upper management) could
demand that the Linux installations be removed without
revealing themselves to all that their ONLY goal was to
facilitate siphoning as much money out of the company or
corporation into Microsoft's coffers.