[B Knotts]

You're only looking at the short-term costs. Long-term costs are important, too.

And, due to Microsft's asinine policies, the hospital in your example is wasting lots of money and man-hours doing unnecessary work.

You should consider the amount of time and money spent on:

• Doing unnecessary separate installations
• Purchasing the second copies
• Maintaining all the licenses, records, etc.

These are non-trivial costs, but they always seem to get overlooked by Microsoft advocates.

You can migrate gradually, you know, which will spread migration costs over a long period of time.

See this article from CIO Magazine:

How to run a Microsoft-free shop

[MarkL]

You're only looking at the short-term costs. Long-term costs are important, too.

No... The long term costs are quite high as well. The hospital would have to hire new programmers to create and maintain the software that would need to be created from the ground up, unless some of the venders would agree to port their software over to Linux. For what it's worth, they already have a number of Linux servers, as well as VMS, AIX, WinNT, Win2000, and 18 NetWare servers. Some of the cross platform software that they use in many cases is custom written, and I've been informed that the vender will not port it to Linux. It is simply not feasable for the hospital to move to Linux, especilly because a) they are a not-for-profit organization who can't hire the development and support staff that would be needed for the conversion, and b) they are part of a medical group that has specific standards, that requires members to run certain apps on certain operating systems: This is not open to negotiation..

See this article from CIO Magazine:

How to run a Microsoft-free shop

I am familiar with the article. It also mentions that the comparison network ran standard office automation and simple accounting applications, and nothing else...

Mark