Saw this was an article on www.linux.org ( http://www.linux.org/news/2005/01/29/0004.html )

This is the most ridiculous thing i have heard, is micrsoft getting real desperate.

The comment written by cdrworm ( http://www.linux.org/news/comment/00005556/0002.html )for the above article was pretty good, i think some one should mail it to microsoft.

and one of the funniest things is

msn and/or hotmail server is FreeBSD. (so is yahoo) That shows how much they trust their own software security and performance wise. someone should rub that truth in microsofts face.

hmm something tells me that FreeBSD is also open source. or maybe microsoft has another explanation for that.

Wanna further ridiculous readings? www.micrisoft.com/getthefacts
Now, I rarely saw a so powerful promotion FOR Linux. MS problem is that they understimate their own costumers, which is, in many cases,a sort of marketing tecnique that works only if there's a good reason to understimate users.
In this case, where a product and the information reguarding it, are spread all over the world, it is impossible to claim things that are so clearly untrue.
MS, we need more facts and less talk.

I see Microsoft are getting more than the recommended daily dosage of FUD.

They should just eat Weetabix, or something.

read this: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/30723/index.html

No they aren't. M$ converted hotmail to 2k server shortly after they bought it and to the best of my knowledge MSN has never run on anything but M$.

Yahoo does run FreeBSD, but I fail to see how that's relevant.

Up until fairly recently I'd wager I could root a default Linux install faster than I could get admin on a default Windows install. The simple fact is that Windows can be made secure and out of the box (patched up) with no third party software on it, windows is very secure (from the outside). The same thing makes both of them equally dangerous and that is the halfwit admins running them, and they come from both sides of the fence.

you could be right. as far as from what i have read is that they did switch to windows after getting hotmail and after some nice crashin they switched back to freeBSD.

if you look on the net you will find a lot of articles about it, and also that microsoft was looking for skilled BSD admins.

Those articles are really old. Netcraft has the current situation. Of course we have no idea what the backend servers run, but I'm pretty confident it's windows. If there's one thing M$ is good at it's throwing money at a problem to make it go away.

The figures I'd be interested in though are the number of IIS machines it took to replace the BSD machines. I'm betting it wasn't 1:1