"Two years ago, when Rick Carey was chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, he was crazy about Linux and especially about Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor. At the time, he was leading the charge to migrate all of the computer systems at Merrill to Linux. But these days, things have changed. Carey, who is now chief technology architect at Bank One, says that although he still likes Linux, he's not rushing into any deployments of the open-source operating system," according to Forbes.
The story says customers like Carey resent the Red Hat policy of charging per processor which will significantly boost the cost of using Linux: "The companies that are trying to treat Linux like it's regular software and have a business model based on per-CPU or per-desktop licensing worry the heck out of me," Carey says. "For us, that makes Linux prohibitively expensive. And it makes a stronger case for us to go Windows."
Another danger is emerging. Although dozens of Linux distributions exist, switching from one to the other could become more difficult as companies like Red Hat and its rival, SuSE, which is owned by Novell, attempt to differentiate their Linux distributions by developing new features. Once applications are written to work with a certain set of features, moving them to a different Linux distribution could require a lot of difficult and expensive rewriting. "That's what makes me cautious," Carey says. "There's a risk there. I have the right to switch, but it could be costly."
