The problem with weather is that no one can do anything about it. That's an advantage for weather.com, the Weather Channel's Website because it means everyone from golfers to travelers is intensely interested in what the weather will be. When weather.com picked Linux to replace Sun Solaris on the image servers on its site, it did so because of its advantages and a couple of its disadvantages as well.

The disadvantage -- that Linux started as an low-cost, amateur operating system among students and computer enthusiasts -- was a major plus for weather.com, according to Mark Ryan, chief technology officer for the Weather Channel Enterprises. It meant that talented young programmers were familiar with Linux. That was in contrast to Sun Solaris, which weather.com had been using to serve images.

"Just about every graduate coming out of college has Linux experience at some level," Ryan says. "Not unlike other communities like Silicon Valley and New York where there are large volumes of incubators for business, Solaris and Sun skills are a very tight market," Ryan says of the Atlanta, Ga., area where weather.com is located. "We had to decide whether to stay in that market where those skill sets were hard to come by or diversify into alternate strategies."

According to Daniel Frye, IBM's program director for Linux technology in Somers, N.Y., that can have a distinct impact on an organization's costs. "The total cost of ownership is being impacted," he says. "Not only the price of boxes but also in retention of skills." The skills situation is a distinct turnaround that is becoming increasingly common as Linux replaces Solaris as the educational version of Unix. "For a long time, people [were] coming out of school with Solaris skills," Frye says. "Now we're seeing a sea change in what people are doing in college." From its days of being an obscure Unix substitute, Linux has grown to become the standard educational operating system. That circumstance has had a major impact on talent availability. Now nearly everyone has at least been exposed to Linux, and some programmers have used it throughout their college careers.

The other disadvantage of Linux that helped sell it to weather.com is the availability of open source support. "There are a large volume of forums where I can dial in and say I had problems with my Linux system and get back 20 or 30 answers in ten minutes," he says. "Support is very good in the Linux environment."

Good support is important because weather.com is a round-the-clock site that gets between 5 and 30 million hits a day. "It's not dissimilar to The Weather Channel where when someone signs on, they don't want to see a blank screen," Ryan

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