There's no free lunch there. The software licensing costs are cut, but the administration/setup fees increase.
They [IBM] were just smart enough to realize the potential for both profit and diversity of business model in OSS.
IBM lobbying California to mandate open source software makes me laugh. I can only imagine IBM's reaction to the hypothetical situation where California requires all mainframe hardware purchases be from "open hardware" companies.
Not in my experience for the latter. Just look at the uptimes in the article for the RNC/DNC sites. Who do you think has to pay more attention administering his box? In another environment, how is it that Largo, Florida, has 800 users on 400 seats being run by 10 admittedly underworked admins? I've never seen a Windows environment that thin on admins.