Just one small note: those experiences are from 2002 and I was writing about my first experience when running it on my Sony Vaio.
Running on a modern 64Gb Ram hardware is a totally different experience, 24 years later
I like it. It's not perfect, but it's a good way to make sure that platforms will continue to be able to federate. They're evolving and things will improve. The experience is much better today, compared to some years ago.
It doesn't. You can Always translate the text in your favourite language.
The project aims to send the forecasts to the users, so can't be multilingual.
Anyway, that's the reason why there are the emojis. Those ones are international.
They do. And yes, choosing a good distribution will help.
But the fact that most servers run Linux isn't indicating it's the best choice.
Most desktops run Windows - and this doesn't mean it's the best desktop OS :-)
Of course, you're free to think that. Sometimes dynamics aren't very linear and people are more inclined to avoid problems rather than create more. The concern about this company was obviously well-founded and valid, and the people involved didn't like it. Some of the choices they made were undoubtedly questionable, and I admit I was disappointed. Of course, I couldn't tell the whole story or all the details, but in the end, the company didn't get away with it completely. This event gained some traction through word-of-mouth among colleagues, and their user base plummeted in a short time.
I've modified this sentence, I hope it's clearer now:
They had already received a proposal - expensive but, when compared to similar offers made to other organizations, apparently reasonable — for a managed service hosted by an external provider and based on an open source mail stack. The company offered a managed version with its own proprietary additions and enterprise support.
The catch? While such pricing had become almost "normal" in the market, it was still wildly inflated considering what was actually being delivered. Agency A already had solid infrastructure - reputable IP classes, redundant datacenters, everything running smoothly. We had built and maintained that environment for years, and it was still performing perfectly.