In many respects, I think that OSS already has a good start in Windows with Firefox, Thunderbird and Oo.

When Bob Hecht joined Informa PLC as its vice president of content strategy, he dreamed of rebuilding the British technical publisher’s infrastructure using Linux and open-source technologies. But with Microsoft Windows entrenched throughout the company, Hecht settled on a more pragmatic hybrid: an open-source content management server from Alfresco Software Inc., backed up by open-source applications MySQL, Apache Tomcat and JBoss - all running on Windows Server-based hardware.

“Would I want to put it all on Linux? Yeah, that’s the geek in me,” Hecht said at this week’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. “But the Alfresco application doesn’t necessarily run better under Linux.”

And although the Windows licenses may make the initial costs a little more expensive for Informa, not having to rehire or retrain existing IT staff makes “the whole thing a wash,” he said…. [Source: Computer World]