Also, in financial documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission last year to go public, Orbitz revealed its contracts with the company's five founding airlines call for per-ticket commission rates the airlines pay Orbitz to fall 15 percent to 30 percent annually through 2007. Orbitz has yet to launch its initial public offering.
Bill Moffitt, Solaris group marketing manager for Sun, said he's not surprised the E4500 servers were more than Orbitz wanted to pay. He said the systems probably delivered more horsepower than the travel agency needed. While unavailable last fall, Sun now sells the Sun Fire V60 and V65 servers that can run either Solaris- or Linux-on-Intel.
"They're going to do fine (with Linux) and they're going to get low cost. But Solaris would have delivered better total cost of ownership through the life of the machine," he asserted. Orbitz had no TCO numbers for Linux vs. Solaris.
The biggest controversy surrounding Linux today involves licensing. Unix seller The SCO Group claims Linux contains source code it owns, and therefore violates its intellectual property rights. Earlier this year, SCO issued a letter to 1,500 of the world's largest corporations, warning that they may be liable for IP violations in Linux. SCO has also filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM for its use of Linux.
"As a company that either has been or potentially threatened by SCO, I don't think it would be wise for me to comment on the case," Chism said.
