may otherwise be lying idle. They can load Linux and get serious business

applications running on them at no extra cost. Other savings include the fact

that no investment is required for anti-virus software as there are no viruses

for Linux! The OS is free but you may have to pay for services, if you do not

have expertise within the organization.

Linux reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). TCO is the cost of owning the

total system, which includes the cost of hardware and the software, as well as

running and maintaining the system. There is no cost per user/client/server.

In fact the cost benefit improves as you add more nodes. Since Linux runs very

efficiently, the more people start using the Linux server for various

applications, the more effectively you are utilizing your server.

In one organization that I worked with, there was a strong consideration to go

for Windows NT and Microsoft Exchange. They had more than 100 employees and

they realized that if they did that, it would cost them 1,000,000 Rupees. I

convinced the management to go the Linux way. They pulled out an old Pentium

computer, which was not being used and converted that to a Linux mail server.

Today it runs very well, requires almost no maintenance and it didn't cost them

anything, as they didn't even have to buy a server.

Flexibility

Linux comes bundled with commercial grade applications. The reason why I use

the word "Commercial Grade" is because people consider commercial software

to be better and more reliable than free software. This isn't true any

more -- Linux distributions bundle includes Sendmail, which is the most popular

mail server and powers some of the largest mail servers. It comes also comes

with Apache, the most popular Web server. Several other powerful applications

are either bundled with the base distributions or are available separately such

as Qmail, which is another mail server and powers Hotmail.com.

Linux is a reliable and stable OS. No more crashes. A small telecom software

company decided to deploy Linux for one of the big cellular operators in

Mumbai, India. The server is running non-stop for more than a year now without

any maintenance. That's the kind of reliability that Linux offers that is

needed for mission critical applications.

It offers scalability and inter-operability. Linux can run on a Palm computer