[kawhah]

It was totally a risky choice for companies in the 1990s and early 2000s to put all their web stuff onto Linux on commodity hardware instead of proprietary Unix or Windows servers. Many did it when their website being up was totally mission critical. Lots did it on huge server farms. It paid off very quickly but it's erasing history to suggest that it didn't require huge amounts of guts, savvy and agility to even attempt it.

[pjmlp]

Indeed, for me GNU/Linux was always a cheap way to have UNIX at home, given that Windows NT POSIX support never was that great.

The first time I actually saw GNU/Linux powering something in production was in 2003, when I joined CERN and they were replacing their use of Solaris, and eventually alongside Fermilabs came up with Scientific Linux in 2004.

Later at Nokia, it took them until 2006 to consider Red-Hat Linux a serious alternative to their HP-UX infrastructure.