A month or so, I was in the checkout line at Burlington Coat Factory with Michelle—buying baby stuff, of course—when I noticed that the point of sale system was running Linux. Seems that Burlington is pretty happy with its decision. Their CIO, Mark Prince, makes an observation that supports what Linux and UNIX users have crowed about for at least a decade now:

“We have more people supporting a handful of Windows users than roughly 7,000 Linux systems,” Prince said. He added that the Linux systems “just sit there and don’t break. They run and run and run. People can’t mess them up. They don’t get messed up on their own. Unless there’s a hardware problem, we almost never have to do anything with them.”

Not all has been rosy: there has been some resistance to switching from Microsoft Office to StarOffice, but they’ve largely overcome that. He also notes that the lack of consistency between competing Linux desktop environments (i.e. Gnome, KDE, etc.) have caused the system to fail to catch on. (Wasn’t CDE supposed to fix that years ago?)