I worked in civil engineering consultancy for the best part of ten years and although everyone used windows I always thought the business was ripe for conversion to linux/FOSS. We used various specialist applications pretty much round the clock, particularly CAD, and any reduction in the regular "server down for maintenence" periods would have been most welcome to a project manager like me, and presumably to the bean counters as well. I would imagine the same goes for the architects, environmental consultants, structural and M&E engineers I worked with too, as all worked in a similar way.
FOSS alternatives to the industry standard proprietary CAD & GIS solutions were criminally overlooked too imo - limited numbers of floating proprietary software licences to serve a large pool of users created a constant practical problem. Chris
