steel301 wrote:
There are inherent flaws with FOSS that businesses will always shy away from.

1. Linux is not free. Linux requires time. Time isn't free by any stretch of the imagination. Time is the most expensive commodity in existence. Multiple sources all say that linux requires more time to maintain and setup then Windows.

2. No guarantees about future products or backwards compatibility. MS takes great care to guarantee backwards compatibility in it's OS. Example. The original Sim City relies on objects not being freed after they are destroyed. A bug in Windows 95. Even with XP you can install Sim City and it will still run. Even though that bug has been fixed. So, if you install Sim City, then objects that it creates aren't freed even after they are destroyed, but this only happens when running Sim City. Look at GTK as a counter example. GTK 2 is completely different from gtk1. All apps that wish to utilize the new features have to be rewritten. How is that utilizing productivity if your just rewriting the same code?

3. No guaranteed support. The only companies that guarantee support are ones that sell there product to the consumer (Novell, RHEL, IBM). A company/person isn't going to use a product if there voices aren't being heard. MS takes great strides to find and fix almost every reproducible bug that is reported to it. MS even supports software released by other companies. Adobe Distiller requires an exact OS string to be returned in order for it to work. If Windows detects certain version of Adobe Distiller installed, it will return the exact OS string that Distiller is looking for so it functions properly.

I'll post more when I think of them.


I think the FOSS people would definately reject your first argument. Loss of time when rebooting for patches, etc. Consider how many people are still running Windows NT 4.0, a much less stable system.

I think Items 2 and 3 can be addressed by saying, "Well, you have the source code, you can change it yourself!" Yep, requires time, but you could do it, if you really needed to. 

Just some thoughts.