http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&ncid=738&e=9&u=/cmp/20030821/tc_cmp/13100775

What do you all think of that?

Any real surprises there? Microsoft even has some GPL tools, released in their Services for Unix package.

Whatever it takes to keep it up

I commend them for it.

since ws is the most widely used os in the world it would makes sense that it would also be the most hacked and slashed.
changing to a competitive os makes a ton of sense

Actually this is not true.
Microsoft use Akamai caching service which runs under linux.
However the real servers behind running and actually serving the content are Windows 2003 servers.

You beat me to mentioning this very thing BladeRunner

Do you know if Akamai uses something like squid for their caching servers or is this a pretty standard config for *nix caching servers