For a lot of startups, I would assume that free is better than paid. Even for those willing to pay for Microsoft products, the pricing is confusing: http://www

For a lot of startups, I would assume that free is better than paid. Even for those willing to pay for Microsoft products, the pricing is confusing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.asp... I have also found Windows programmers on average to be more expensive than LAMP developers, which is an important concern as you look to build a startup's team. I'm not so much concerned with vendor lock-in so much as I would be concerned with the support of an open source community. The free resources and tools available for PHP, Python, Ruby, etc., are hard to beat. I'm not sure if the same breadth of resources exist for Windows.