The bes arguments I've seen use the monoculture analogy from farming:
If every farmer plants the same variety as every other farmer in a region, they all get spectacular results, and the benefit of mass purchases to lower the cost of seed and fertilizer, but when a bug or disease strikes one farmer's crop, all of them get it and the whole region's crop is destroyed.
With an all windows house (or all Linux for that matter) one new exploit and the whole system is in danger -- we're facing the need to patch over a thousand machines this week because of a new windows vulnerability, and our parent company has over 2500 in just one building!
Adding Linux to the mix of a companies servers and/or desktops actually helps them weather the storms better.
--Matthew
-----Original Message-----
From: Aron Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 4:35 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [newbie] OT: Peaceful Coexistence
On Wednesday 30 July 2003 12:06 pm, Todd Slater wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 09:21:09PM +0300, Robin Turner wrote:
> > Stephen Kuhn wrote:
> > >Now, what I'm trying to get at here is this simple fact: Linux and
> > >Microsoft can get along - and get along quite well together. I went
<snip>
> Sorry for hijacking this thread but . . .
** You are not hijacking this will fit in just right with what promises to be
**a very intresting thread
>
> I need suggestions for selling folks at work (a technical college) that
> Linux should be part of our IT curriculum (especially the web
> development/e-commerce part). They want to keep everything Windows,
> .net, .asp, java; I'm not faculty but would like to point out the folly
> of a Windows-only approach. What can I cite (that is not hyper-biased)
> other than the Netcraft surveys showing over 60% of web servers run
> Apache?
<snip>
> Todd
