[JohnBooty]

> why do you care if it needs to run on Windows? I would normally assume you don't want the license cost of the OS, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall licensing cost.

At my company we had a single Windows server for aaaaages that we kept around because of a legacy MSSQL install we needed. Only Windows box in the whole server farm. Was a bit of a pain.

Of course, MSSQL-on-Linux wouldn't necessarily have been the answer here... I'm sure we would have had to buy a new MSSQL license to run it on Linux.

Eventually we eliminated the need for it entirely, but had MSSQL-on-Linux been an option a few years ago we might have simply migrated it to Linux and paid the necessary license.