Linux saves companies millions

[Marcia]

From a News.com article about Merrill Lynch's research and plans to deploy Linux to potentially save the company millions of dollars:

Merrill Lynch: Linux saves money [news.com.com]

Telecommunications provider Verizon disclosed that it saved nearly $6 million in equipment costs by moving its programmers to Linux from proprietary-Unix and Windows workstations. In October 2001, Amazon.com revealed that it had replaced Web application servers running on a proprietary-Unix platform with Linux, saving millions of dollars.

[littleman]

Here it is, June 2003, and an old conservative company is switching its architecture over to Linux. And, the only thing I am wondering about is why did it take them so long?

[digitalghost]

>>And, the only thing I am wondering about is why did it take them so long?

Could be this. [eet.com]

[littleman]

Do you remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail? SCO is the Black Knight.

[bird]

The SCO events didn't have any influence on companies waiting so long. This is a very new development, after all, and the decisions leading to eg. Merril Lynch switching had been made long before that. I'm happy to know that the city of Munich here is also about to switch more than 10k seats this year.

Btw: The funny thing about SCO is that they used to offer free downloads of Linux from their own servers under the GPL, most likely including the parts that they now want royalties for. Depending on what exactly was in those download packages, their attempts to get money for the same thing now through other channels may be quite futile. You can't distribute something under the GPL one day, and ask money for its use the next.