

How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters - spahl
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/06/How_a_Microsoft_veteran_learned_to_love_Linux_and_why_it_matters_48542167.html

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shin_lao
This article is wrong in many areas.

First of all getting the NT kernel and building upon is a thing you can do
without getting the source code. The driver development kit of Windows is
order of magnitude better in terms of documentation and ease of use (as far as
kernel development is easy) than the Linux or BSD driver kit (I've worked on
all of three).

You don't really need the source code of the kernel when you have all the
documentation you need and a powerful API.

If you really need the source code for what you are doing, Microsoft gives
access to this source code. You get a remote access via smartcard and can
browse through the whole source code (remember the 2000 source code leak).

The source code availability, is really not, I think, the explanation why
Windows NT doesn't dominate the server world. You don't need to recompile or
tinker the kernel to administrate a Windows machine, this need simply doesn't
exist.

The reason is that it took a lot of time for Windows to adopt a server
philosophy. If you've played with Windows Server 2008, you realize Microsoft
is getting there.

One of the things I like with Windows Server 2008 is that it doesn't install
the whole universe and let you precisely pick what you want to deploy on your
machine.

The addition of a more powerful shell and a more transparent administration
panel helps as well.

Another problem is the very rich, but complex, ACL (access control list)
system of Windows NT. Although you can deploy extremely fine grained and
subtle rights and authorizations with this system, in UNIX you just type
"chmod 0755" and 99.9% of the cases you're fine with it.

Last but not least, Windows carries a bad reputation in terms of reliability
and security.

In terms of performance or features, NT has got nothing to envy to Linux or
BSD.

The reason to me is really a "packaging" problem, the technology is capable.

~~~
greyfade
>Another problem is the very rich, but complex, ACL (access control list)
system of Windows NT. Although you can deploy extremely fine grained and
subtle rights and authorizations with this system, in UNIX you just type
"chmod 0755" and 99.9% of the cases you're fine with it.

Unixes - the *BSDs and Linux in particular - have supported ACLs for a long
time. `man setfacl` will give you an overview of how it works on the
filesystem. Many system services, like X11, and some other programs, like
screen, also support ACL on some level. File modes are by no means the only
means of permissions control.

------
saurabh
"You cannot, by accident, build an airplane that actually flies."

I guess I can use this somewhere.

~~~
zyb09
well we know it happened at least once in this universe

~~~
berntb
You talk about life? Evolution can be mapped onto a search strategy -- hardly
equivalent with "accident", as used in the GP.

(Also, flight evolved multiple times. Just consider birds, insects and bats.)

------
cookiecaper
Just skimmed it but one of the big quotes "If Microsoft NT had been free from
the beginning, Linux wouldn't have been created", or whatever it was, is
wrong. Linux was a personal project of Linus Torvalds initially commenced for
private learning purposes.

Of course, it's impossible to know how certain events would have effected
certain other things, but it seems that there's not much that could have
happened in the market that would have stopped Linux's actual creation.

Its domination, however, is a different story; I'm sure if Windows was an open
platform there would have been relatively little attraction to Linux and it
would have burned out in the same obscurity that it was born from. But, such
soothsaying is silly.

