20 mails on this subject and nobody has mentioned one of the main factors major corporates care most about. I'm talking about the "Who's responsible for an f-up?" or "Passing the buck." factor.
A common scenario would be something like this. A server running Windows 2003 fails due to a problem with the OS. The business owner of the server screams at the IT Manager, who inturn screams at the techs. The techs promply point a finger at Microsoft who is ever willing to bend over, take it up the tailpipe and provide a solution/workaround ASAP, ie. if the company is a "Gold" customer. I have seen this happen, and I believe that this is a common occurance as most major corporates end up being Gold customers of Microsoft.
And this is not just with Microsoft, a recent incident that I came across proved this.
A certain corporate has a very large mail setup, several servers hosting thousands of POP mailboxes. The OS used here was RH7.3 or RH9. A decision is taken to cut down the number of servers that mailboxes reside on to two. The hardware selected was powerful intel based hardware from Sun. The OS of choice was Centos 4.0 because it was recommended by the vendor who supported the mail servers. A hardware related hiccup caused the corporate to refer the matter to Sun who promply refused to provide support. The reason cited for the refusal was that the boxes were certified for RHEL and not Centos, so Sun wouldn't be responsible for problems. After being stung by something like this, the business side decided that the servers are to be migrated to Solaris, and any software distributed with an open source license, specifically if the license/documentation states that "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY" and that the developer is not resposible for any data loss or other problems arising from using the software. To what extent this decision was adhered to, I don't know.
No matter how much we stress of the benefits of Linux instead of Windows, the question of accountability for problems with the software and who is going to fix it will always be a stumbling block. Agreed that GNU/Linux distributions have much lesser problems than the competitor, but the corporates want someone to turn to or someone to blame for the problems they face, and that *someone* should be able to fix the problem or provide a workaround promptly. Microsoft seems to be doing that pretty well.
Any comments on this case?