Aye, there's the bugger. I'm not sure how that works out. Last I heard from my source, he'd had a chat with some folks from Redmond, in part discussing the licensing question. Not sure what the final resolution was.

Still, even with the licensing costs, administration of the systems is greatly simplified. You're running an image on top of Linux, with all the tools Linux provides to allow replication and restoration of that image.

Incidentally, a recent presentation I saw (autonomous computing) by IBM, there was mention of running various OS images on zSeries hardware, MS Windows included. Which makes me wonder if IBM's got that particular virtualization issue resolved.

Being able to seamlessly transmit and substitute images of proprietary and free OSs is going to do a fair bit to break up lock-in.