Re: Low/No Cost Unix

[Jay Sekora <jay@ccs.neu.edu>]

Just a comment:  With an OS where source code is available, a
sufficiently large or well-motivated organization has the option of
supporting the OS in-house.  If Microsoft (say) won't fix a bug, you're
stuck.  With Linux or FreeBSD or whatever, you can fix it yourself.
(And with Solaris, you could buy a source-code license and do the same
- does anybody know if Microsoft will sell source-code licenses to
their OSes?)

Yes, that's very expensive, but I think it's a reasonable option for 
a mission-critical piece of infrastructure, and the existence of a 
public culture of people working on the freely-distributable OSes 
makes it somewhat cheaper than it would otherwise be.

Jay Sekora
<jay@ccs.neu.edu>