Sorry to resurrect a dead subject....Not a good generalization. I'm with Andrew, too often do people say linux works like this or I don't like this about linux or linux' TCO is too high, etc. when these are mainly distribution specific arguments.
One can find many free, full distributions of linux. Over the past 6 years
I've invested $50 (RH 5.1 box set -the book was great) yet have
installed/used many distributions and burned my own copies w/o sacrificing
my soul or paying MS. Stating that "linux" no longer is free/low-cost is a
strange position; please oh please don't confuse Red Hat with Linux nor vice
versa.
I seem to have put across the impression that I am new to linux and confuse RH with linux. I actually started with Debian in 1997 and have had several servers running debian since then. I never had a server with RH until we replaced our Unix server with an IBM x86 server 18 months ago and the two "supported" operating systems on that server at the time were RH Advanced Server 2.1 and Windows. I still have several debian servers on many systems (IBM x86 included).
When you get servers that are carrying hardware maintenance (with IBM, etc) it is best to run what is considered "supported." It's very easy to say "use a free version" but when you get into the business world and start having to deal with "supported" versions and platforms it is a royal pain in the butt. If you have problems with a commercial app on an unsupported configuration, all you can hope is for a cool tech that is willing to ignore the fact that you are running Debian (which I did with Lotus Domino and a debian server).
I spent 15 minutes talking to IBM today about their backup software support for AMD64. Basically they said to run their "supported version of SUSE or RH" and the 32bit mode should work.
I guess my point is that when you get beyond just playing with linux on one machine or one desktop and start running commercial apps on it, you sometimes don't have the option to continue using debian, slackware, etc. When you are in that world, then the entire argument of "use a free distro" is no longer a simple statement.
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