... this kind of thinking is extremely risky to one's career, for good or for worse. Remember "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Well, no one ever got fired for buying Cisco or Microsoft. Sure, SquirrelMail is a nice little piece of work, and a solution of BSD or Linux, qmail, Apache, MySQL, BIND, and Webmin will do wonders for the small company looking to have a solid solution on the cheap. But the big companies are willing (and want to!) pay through the nose for the privilege of having an account rep who knows your name, support 24 x 7 from a real live phone voice (even if the accent is thick on occassion), and a shelf full of manuals which no one will ever need. Because on the very slim chance that the system blows up and the fingers start getting pointed, no one wants to hear "well, there are plenty of Web sites that I can find with Google that are filled with help!" Especially when the system crash took the WAN link down and without that shelf of manuals and that 24 x 7 support contract, no one can get to Google.

It's just the way of the world.

I use BSD at home. But Linux in the enterprise is a hard sell without a vendor behind it. There is a good reason why you see SLES and RHEL in the enterprise, but not Ubuntu or Slackware or Gentoo.

J.Ja