While I encourage people to embrace open source tools and libraries as much as possible, I also would like to issue a word of caution on feeling too comfortable targeting a proprietary environment such as Windows.
Some people have compared Mac OS X and Windows because of their proprietary nature, but one key difference is that you don't run Mac OS X as a server operating system or on the cloud. While many people develop on Mac OS X, they might still build and deploy to a Linux server.
For Windows to support the GNU/Linux userland is to finally empower Windows as a competitive platform for the cloud. Windows has suddenly became a viable deployment target for a wide spectrum of software that prior to this could not target Windows.
I am not looking forward for a lower market share of Linux (or BSD, Solaris derivatives, to be fair) on servers or on the cloud.
replies(2):