"With a handful of key Wall Street brokerage firms acting as icebreakers, Linux is quickly gaining ground on Unix and Windows as a mission-critical operating system within the securities industry. The attractions: its flexibility across systems and the savings it yields through the use of commodity hardware.
"The list of people in the queue who are saying 'When I have a new project, I'm going to use Linux' is larger than we can handle," said Rick Carey, chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York. "I'd say it will be significant over the next year. A majority of new projects are interested in Linux." "While Cary said he still prefers Microsoft's performance for some functions, such as desktop applications, he said the cost of running Linux is typically a tenth of the cost of Unix and Microsoft alternatives. "Since the beginning of the year, Carey has been immersed in a Linux rollout for mission-critical applications, including a mainframe-based 401(k) application that generates about 200,000 statements every quarter." http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/linux/story/0,10801,75271,00. html Mark Post
