Thank you everyone for the great response!

So far I have tried Arch linux using Virtual PC. It has been interesting. The main reasons for considering linux are: reliability, efficiency and cost.

Are business model is about selling software. It is more focused around highly scalable web development and business intelligence. (Ever read The Data Webhouse Toolkit by the Kimball group?)

I doubt we will be able to afford a lot of hardware when we first start out, so I thought we could use VM to simulate separate servers, clients, and development machines. Running a very lean version of linux on these VMs could save us a lot of cash early on.

However, right now all my development (at my day job) is done in Visual Studio and SQL Server. So this will be a big change. On top of that, I know nothing about non-microsoft data warehousing tools (SSIS for Oracle anybody?). So it is a bit of a scary jump. But I guess I am going to start.

Who knows, if we can get some inexpensive development licenses, that may get us off the ground before we need to lay out the big cash when we go into production. However, that doesn't address my concern about scalability and reliability.

I guess my conclusion is that I will go ahead and learn linux, but I will have to keep digging to figure out which platform wil be best for the new business.

Thanks again for all the comments.