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In an article titled The Windows vs. Linux Decider, James Maguire and his “interviewee” Dick Federle attempt a hatchet job on Linux under the guise of rationality.

The article starts promisingly enough:

Along the way, Federle noticed an odd phenomenon in the world of IT. He’s seen many managers make one of their most critical decisions — whether to opt for Windows or Linux - on strictly personal grounds.

Many choose between Windows and Linux based on a gut feeling &3151 in an abstract, almost philosophical manner. This innermost intuition is not the way to go in what should be a straight-ahead business decision.

“There are any number of [IT] shops — probably the majority, quite frankly — that have a religious opinion about whether they should be on one platform or another,” Federle said. “It really has little or nothing to do with the reality of the virtues of any of the platforms.”

I agree with that statement, as far as it goes. But then the article veers sharply off the track and into FUD-land with the statement

Instead, the Windows-Linux decision is driven by factors like whether “the CIO loves Windows, or hates Gates.”

The article goes on to detail Federle’s personal choice (Windows of course) and his “rational thinking” that got him to that decision; arranged as a set of Microsoft talking points I have addressed thuroughly before. I particularly like this piece of “straight ahead business” logic from Federle:

“There are people who say, ‘I’m not going to put my mission critical on the Microsoft platform because it’s not stable enough.’ Well, Verizon runs all of its billings systems on it — and who knows how many trillions of transactions that handles.”

Also interesting is Federle’s complete unwillingness to even say the word “Linux”. Carefully chosen phrasing lets him talk about it without ever really saying it, to the point that even the author had to add

Moreover, “Saying the cost of [Linux] software is ‘free,’ or it’s ‘freeware,’ well, no — if you’re going to run it in production you have to go buy the MySQL licenses, you have to buy the Oracle licenses.” And while Red Hat software is “dirt cheap,” it isn’t free, he notes.

So, if I understand the article right; if you choose Linux for any application, you’re a religious zealot who hates Bill Gates personally, and it doesn’t really matter anyway because Microsoft is destroying programming and development the way they did the desktop space. Sheesh!