[antiRepublicrat]

The software licensing costs are cut, but the administration/setup fees increase.

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.

[TheEngineer]

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 know enough to know that no one can fully analyze these situations based on that pittance of info.

[Bush2000]

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?

You literally have no idea of the kinds of things that the admins on those sites are doing. If they take their HTTP servers offline to update content 5 times a day, that has nothing to do with the stability or usefulness of the underlying software. Provide some evidence that the servers were actually down and we might agree; otherwise, you're blowing smoke.