First off, I am looking for intelligent reponses here, I do not want to get into a Flame war between the Linux and MS camps, I understand that both camps have their pros and cons and respect them as such.

Ok, first a little back story on my companies infastructure. We are a Non-Profit organization, however, we are a large non-profit organization in terms of how many devices we have connecting to our network. Unfortunately, Microsoft has changed its licensing model and we have been moved out of the Non-Profit category into the Small Business Category and we are on the borderline of being considered an Enterprise company.

This is unfortunate as our IT budget can in no way shape or form support the amount of money that would be required to purchase Server License's, CAL's, etc at full retail price.

Obviously, open source is a clear option for us since we would need to only buy support and not worry about CAL's and such. I have a basic understanding of Linux and am aware of the applications available that could replace our current applications.

Another problem we are encountering is that all of our web applications are developed on the .NET framework running over IIS (obviously) and this would require a rewrite of all applications into PHP to be placed on Apache.

Has anyone dealt with a conversion of this size? Can anyone provide any information in the Total Cost of Ownership and what a conversion like this might cost?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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http://dev.mainsoft.com/Default.aspx?tabid=49
:)

Lots of the TCO research has looked into retraining as being the main cost of moving to GNU/Linux. But when you're faced with having to retrain when vista becomes compulsory, that's a hit you're going to have anyhow. Seems to make sense to jump now. I would recommend doing a bit at a time, rather than trying to switch everything overnight.

There's a good article here, which may be helpful:
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupda...907876,00.html

You may be able to use mono to do that, rather than going the php route, eg http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/May-19.html. I'm afraid I've no experience of doing this, or how well web stuff is supported. But it would probably save a fair bit of learning time and allow you to continue to write in c#.

erm, depends on how big "this size" is, I suppose! We ported our organisational website to php from asp a few years back, mainly using automated conversion tools. It took a week or so, but this was a mainly content based site at the time, without that much database interaction - which is the bit that will be tricky. However since moving to php we've developed loads of stuff - we have a proper CMS that fits our needs really well now.



--
Charlie Harvey's website - linux, perl, java, anarchism and punk rock: http://charlieharvey.org.uk

this reads well.....
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtm...d=100000028WT4
although it was written in 2005 so might be a bit dated now

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