
Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows' - tca
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/05/31/google-to-employees-mac-or-linux-but-no-more-windows/
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chl
Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great
idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff
running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running
in IE, on Windows).

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ThomPete
Exactly. One has to wonder what kind of culture this fosters with time.

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DrSprout
Increasingly their users are going to be using Macs and Android, and I really
do expect Linux distros to start to see an upswing as data becomes accessible
on more and more devices.

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zavulon
That makes a lot of sense, as Windows boxes are not really good for web
development, but I really hope they still test everything on Windows,
extensively. Even though their software is web-based, there's still difference
in behavior on different platforms.

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ErrantX
> Windows boxes are not really good for web development

Unfair! I use Linux and Windows for web dev and they are both equally as good
as the other.

EDIT; oh come on, at least justify it... :)

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weavejester
Honestly, it depends what you're developing in. If you're developing in .NET,
Windows isn't a bad platform. Anything else, and Windows starts to feel like a
second-class citizen. For instance, a lot of tools written in Ruby tend to
assume a Unix-like environment, even though the language itself is cross-
platform.

The other problem with Windows is that it doesn't make a very good server, and
it's often useful to develop on the same OS you'll be eventually deploying to.

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jimfl
Windows is surely a better server than OS X. Also, the tool set for web
development on Windows is very mature and stable.

Google is making a business decision here: it is too expensive for them to
support Windows at the level of security they desire, which is likely a higher
standard than most software development shops, and perhaps many banks.

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weavejester
_"Windows is surely a better server than OS X."_

I've been unable to find anything equivalent to Puppet or Chef on Windows.
Might I enquire what tools you use for managing Windows servers?

That said, I doubt I'd ever actually use an OSX server. There's little
difference in functionality between an OSX server and a Linux server, and
Linux servers have no licensing costs to worry about. Currently we're
developing on OSX and Linux desktops, and deploying to Linux servers.

 _"Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and
stable."_

For .NET, maybe. Not for something like Ruby, I'm afraid. Also, we haven't
found any good way of deploying to Windows. I'd be curious how you manage
deploying applications to a Windows server.

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ErrantX
_For .NET, maybe. Not for something like Ruby_

This is ignoring PHP (one of the biggest web dev languages) and Python which
do just as well on both.

Also I have never seen the need to develop on the same platform as your server
(if your using a local server, well, then that makes sense - but it's not the
best workflow and, in addition, that is not a limitation of the development
but of the server requirements :))

I won't disagree Ruby is better on Linux though.

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Zak
If you're the sole developer, it makes a lot of sense to run a local server
for development purposes. It's cheaper, more convenient and really helpful if
you're stuck somewhere with a poor Internet connection.

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InclinedPlane
To a certain degree this is sensible. It will probably make them safer in the
short-term.

Ultimately though this is just a TSA level maneuver. It's reactionary, short-
sighted, and imperfect to a degree that is likely to make it nearly useless.

Security is a meta-property, for organizations as well as for software. You
can't create security in software as a line-item feature. Nor can you create
security in a company by using, or not using, a particular tool. Security
ultimately is an overarching endeavor. If google is serious about security
they need to approach it that way. The particularly dangerous failure mode for
google's recent actions is that they think they've made a serious security
enhancement (at best it's incremental), they become complacent, and then they
get owned harder than before.

Hopefully this is just a teeny, tiny aspect of a larger security initiative,
but from the outside it's difficult to tell if that's the case.

