What people often don't notice about Linux is how fast the evolution goes. Many people still think about Linux as it looked two years ago, with command lines, no applications, long time reboot in case of power failure etc. They also think about what the Linux community did a year ago. Some people even haven't realized that the RSA patents have gone, making kerberos and encryption something that is available in all the Linux programs, even such a small program like command-line FTP.
And they believe that Linux will stay like this for at least a year. That's wrong. A year is a very long time with Linux, almost unpredictably long, as there are numerous examples of.
And since Linux is free, you can always target the newest versions and don't have to support the old versions. Only one server, that my company controls, and that we could imagine to install new software on, hasn't been upgraded to Red Hat 7.2. If a company uses Windows, however, they seldom upgrade all the time, simply because it would be too expensive, both in manpower and software licenses. This is also the reason why NT4 is still a major platform and still is targeted by Windows software vendors.
There are many years technology between NT4/Win95 and now, and as time goes by, this becomes an increasing handicap for Windows. I don't know a single piece of non-Microsoft software, that requires Windows 2000 or later.
Lars. |
