Response: For the most part, I was talking about the needs and requirements that I have when choosing an OS, and I think that was pretty clear in my argumentation.

Also, the topic was using Linux as a server, and not as a workstation, which most of your arguments seems to be based on.

FreeBSD, is as I stated in earlier posts not Linux, but are also released under an Open Source license. It is, however a very nice os, I tend to use OpenBSD, which is a fork that has security as #1 priority.

Uptime is a good number to look at when we are talking stability. Provided the server also meets with the needs the task it has. I'm not that confident win2.0 would have years of uptime and at the same time performing as an FreeBSD webserver.

You know, there is a reason hotmail was run with a backend of FreeBSD and solaris machines. Last I heard the mailservers serving hotmail was run with FreeBSD, with a frontend of win2000 machines.

ONTOPIC: The choice of OS is purely a matter of what you want the server to do, and what skills you are willing to learn (provided you do not have them already). Some things *NIX do better than windows, and vice versa. For me, when I entered the world of *NIX, I got a whole new understanding of OS structure and learned a whole lot. Coming from a windows-world that pretty much shut me out of grasping the concept behind it all, this was a break for me, and I'll never use windows for my own servers again. (Given that I dont need it for special purposes 8) )

Thats my 2 cents, and I'll end my flaming here.