When I was last working in the financial services field, doing computer networking, I was involved with running links inside the raised floor areas of several large investment banks and brokerages. You can guess that they demanded secrecy about what they were doing.

One of the secrets I had to keep, now 10 years old so I guess it’s OK, is that all of them were deploying Linux systems internally. They each considered it to be a strategic asset.

It was kind of funny, getting told yet again, “Don’t say anything about this, but…”

Then the NYSE did it too, so maybe the penguin is out of the bag.

At our site, we run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And I can assure you,
it’s not free. But what we purchase from Red Hat is a
service. We pay them to package Linux software
(all the thousands of pieces written by different people), deliver
it to us, maintain it, and fix bugs. In IT jargon, Red Hat provides
a Linux distro (distribution).

Could we “roll our own” distro, and save the money we are currently
paying to Red Hat? Yes. But Red hat specializes in rolling
a distro. As a result, they are very efficient at it. We, on the
other hand, do not specialize in rolling a Linux
distro; we would inevitably do a far worse job than Red Hat. By
leveraging Red Hat’s specialization (by purchasing their distro),
we become more efficient as well. Leveraging others’
specialization is the heart of capitalism.

Both Red Hat and Microsoft have profit motive. The difference is
that Microsoft wields the government-created fiction of
“intellectual property” to suppress competition. Simply put: if you
attempt to copy Windows (the operating system) and compete
with Microsoft, Microsoft will use the anti-competitive,
anti-capitalist powers the government has given them to drive you
out of business, even if you didn’t use one line of Microsoft’s
code. Thus, Microsoft needs only contend with competition from
non-Windows-based operating systems.

In contrast, not only does Red Hat have to contend with competition
from competing operating systems (e.g., Windows), Red Hat has to
contend with intra-OS competition: because the underlying
Linux software is unencumbered by IP, anyone can package it
and compete with Red Hat. This is not an accident: Linux
was specifically designed to prevent it from being wedded to the
anti-competitive mechanisms of the State. As a result,
there are many Linux distro vendors, both free (e.g., hobbyists) and
commercial. This keeps all of the Linux distro vendors competitive.

Should one always run Linux, and never run Windows? Of
course not; Windows is better in certain situations, and rewarding
inefficiency is rarely wise. But Linux is most definitely
capitalistic. If you shun it automatically because you perceive it’s
not, you’re making a decision based upon ignorance.

In which case, hopefully your competitors will show you the
error of your ways.

According to my experience, whether you pay for software does not significantly influence whether you are happy with the result. Free or paid, good or bad, all combinations occur frequently.

Just to refute your attempt at trolling, for example, the company I used to work for had a paid software update service from a certain vendor. Suddenly, our access stopped working and they did not know how to fix it (they did not even acknowledge that there was a problem). I ended up getting the updates from a warez site. The access magically started working again three weeks later.

On another occasion, I started using a piece of software (F/OSS) that promised better performance than the one I had been using before. The performance was great but there were bugs preventing it from working properly. I was able to fix some of them but did not know how to fix others. I exchanged a couple of emails with the author and discussed the issues. He emailed me a working version the next day, said he spent half a day fixing it.

Just as the Austrian economic theory says, the preferences are subjective, and just because there is no direct money flow from person A to person B does not mean B cannot provide A with top notch products or services. For example, research indicates that with F/OSS, B gets often paid by someone else, e.g. their employer. That was also the case in my example: the author’s employer uses the software internally so they are obviously also interested in having it working without problems.

So yeah, it’s a configuration issue.

I use, and prefer, F/OSS answers to problems, but I’m not a fanatic. I recommend people to use what works for them (Linux works for me, but not for my wife, for example).

Both platforms can work, but for performance tuning Linux lends itself far better because of the ability to strip out pointless processes, such as the GUI. There is also far less system call overhead within the OS when serving web pages.

performance tuning with linux, perl and mysql is one of my specialties, often I achieve an improvement by orders of magnitude. If you are interested, I might be able to help.

Good decision to go back to something produced by someone with a profit motive.

Good luck with that.