Beyond the toolbox, though, I would need to investigate the platform costs of scaling MS technology. For Microsoft, there would be a licensing cost not only fo

Beyond the toolbox, though, I would need to investigate the platform costs of scaling MS technology. For Microsoft, there would be a licensing cost not only for each instance of the OS but also the supporting systems ( SQL Server, VM Manager etc ). I don't have much insight into those costs but at $WORK it is one of the drivers for moving as much portable code to Linux VMs as possible, even at the technical and organisational cost of a split development environment. The Big Apps remain .Net on MS, since that's how they were written, but everyone else is pushed to OSS.