[stoolpigeon]

I think the cost of the tooling did matter but I also agree about licensing costs for their server products.

The first time I got to work with Linux for money (as opposed for fun at home) was when I had a project where the MS Licensing would cost a lot more than the hardware it would run on.

They let me do it with Redhat, PHP and PostgreSQL. They bought the box from Dell and that was it. No licensing to track or pay. The freedom was just amazing and made business sense.