For sometime now we havent had this discussion and than recently i saw this report from Frost & Sullivan, titled "Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Windows 2003 versus Linux in Indian Enterprises", This report focusses on the TCO from the perspective of an Indian Enterprise.

Some Key findings from the report:

Hardware is the largest component of TCO of Indian enterprises. This is strikingly different from the TCO of North American enterprises where Staffing is a significant cost.

Software cost is just about 15% of the Capital expense and just 6.8% of TCO.

Soft costs (costs related to planning, configuration and project management of server environment) are about 17% of TCO, significantly higher than software costs.

Maintenance and Downtime costs constitute about 9% each of the TCO in Indian enterprises.

Windows 2003 server constitutes lower TCO in 70% of the instances encompassing application servers, email servers and network servers. For the balance 30% instances, that encompass Web and File/Print Server- where Linux scores lower TCO, enterprises can gain TCO advantage over Linux by way of shifting to Windows Web Edition and Storage Edition.

Source: 1,2

Prashanth Rai