According to roblimo, AOL is switching many of it's internal systems (desktops? servers?) to Linux.
AOL is switching to Linux for the same reason most large companies make the change: to save money. Thousands of AOL servers are already 100% Linux, and more are switching over every day. AOL number-crunchers figure they can replace an $80,000 box running proprietary UNIX with two $5,000 Linux boxes and get a 50% increase in performance in addition to the cost savings. "Don't tell our competitors," one of our AOL contacts says. "Let them keep buying expensive crap."Funny. Time was if you wanted well-engineered hardware that didn't crash or have hardware problems, you needed to go to Sun, HP, SGI, DEC, IBM or someone similar. Seems like yet another case of "worse is better", where worse isn't as bad as it used to be, and now really is better......
Microsoft's server products have never been seriously considered by AOL, according to our insiders. "The licenses cost too much, their hardware requirements are excessive, they take too much labor to maintain, and we have enough security problems of our own without adding Microsoft's," says an AOL bean-counter who has access to the company's server cost numbers.
Also noted, AOL is in the process of switching from MSIE to Mozilla/Gecko in the many AOL coffee coasters that keep popping up like kudzu. It'll be interesting to see if that includes tabbed browsing, and if AOL users get that feature en masse before IE ads support for tabs.
I was wondering what to do with the CDs themselves. The little tin boxes they come in make dandy ice scrapers in a pinch, though.
