Portent?
My roommate came home from work tonight, he is a program manager for a call center consulting company, with an interesting development. First a quick background, thier main business is obviously inbound and outbound call centers for corporate clients such as Toshiba and Intuit, however they are usually tasked with creating applications for tracking the calls, aggregating data, and reporting. This has been a Microsoft shop running multiple SQL Servers and doing almost everything in a Windows DNA environment with VB. For the last 12-18 months they moved exclusively to N tier web apps with SQL Server in the back and .NET for the rest.
In an effort to cut costs they are about to start piloting Linux. For a call center with with a multitude of desktops that have a narrowly defined scope of function this isn't too suprising, especially since they do most work from a browser. However, he told me they are looking at going a step further and moving from SQL Server to an open source DB, probably PostgreSQL since that is much closer to ANSI SQL than mySQL. And to take it one step further they are looking at going with Apache and Mono so they can continue using .NET but avoid the MS licensing costs!
The biggest spector with that plan is MS could stop ignoring the OSS .NET clones (Mono and dotGNU) and start looking for licensing fees or even try to litigate implentors back into the MS world.
I told him it was too damn bad he may have to abandon SQL Server before getting to play with Yukon ;) but in all seriousness I wonder how many companies are looking at OSS .NET for a production environment?