"Would I want to put it all on Linux? Yeah, that's the geek in me," Hecht said at this week's O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. "But the Alfresco application doesn't necessarily run better under Linux."

And although the Windows licenses may make the initial costs a little more expensive for Informa, not having to rehire or retrain existing IT staff makes "the whole thing a wash," he said.

While open-source applications such as the OpenOffice productivity suite and the Firefox Web browser are aimed at Windows users, back-end software used by businesses is a different matter. Both Microsoft Corp. and open-source vendors have traditionally portrayed the choice of whether to use their software as a black-and-white decision. Choose Microsoft Windows' all-inclusive .Net infrastructure, or run the LAMP stack of applications, which includes Linux, the MySQL database, the Apache Web server and one of three programming languages starting with the letter P: Perl, Python or PHP.

One choice promises easier management at a higher price. The other offers lower costs and better security -- at the cost of more complexity.

But Hecht is part of a growing wave of IT users opting for a third way some have dubbed WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP). They say it provides the best of both worlds.