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My guess is that a lot of big data is deployed on linux, and thus the development environment as well as the well known deployment routines on linux revolves around tools that traditionally work well on Linux, like the headless JRE (for the servers) and Eclipse/Netbeans/IntelliJ (for the development environment).

Can you even set up a bunch of windows server nodes without running into a licensing headache?

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Pretty much this in my experience. C# (and .NET in general) is pretty nice to work in but it is expensive from pretty much every angle. From Visual Studio (which runs over $10k for the Ultimate license) to needing the Enterprise version of Windows Server to do any kind of serious clustering you need a pretty big budget for software if you are going to commit to Windows for your production big data platform.

Also a lot of big data farms have some hardcore kernel optimisations which are not as easily done on Windows (if at all).

Also Java runs pretty much everywhere and is supported. C#/.NET is not (and Mono is not a decent response, if it isn't first party supported it isn't supported).

That's not quite fair to Mono ... Xamarin is a great steward of mono, and is supporting the platform quite well. I guess that statement is pretty subjective, but I can only point to the release history of mono, and related products (MonoTouch, etc.) to show that not only are the releases consistent, but they are quite substantial. The platform is evolving and maturing at a great pace.

Would you consider Linux or BSD to be "first party supported"?

I've had good experiences with Mono and MonoDevelop, and given that Xamarin provides commercial support for Mono, I don't think it makes sense to automatically discard that option.

I'm not sure about FreeBSD, but Oracle supports Java on Linux, so yes, it's first party supported.

Yes. IBM, Red Hat, etc. Also there are tens of thousands of users running distros such as Debian on system much bigger than Windows Server can allow. While saying "first party supported" isn't like for like with Windows (if you are running say Debian) it has a proven track record. While Mono is very good it is still very young. Obviously this is personal opinion but if I am in discussions with vendors on what software stack we are using saying Linux isn't going to get me fired as it is pretty much know to the whole IT world, even PHBs, Mono not so much. Reputation matters a lot. Linux has a good rep in the enterprise world.

I agree, Linux does have a good rep in the enterprise world. My point was simply that, by the open-source, distributed nature of Linux/BSD development there isn't a true "first party" that has control over the whole thing. IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Canonical, et al., certainly do well supporting Linux, but by definition they provide third-party support. (Unless they're providing support for code they've developed and contributed -- that would be first-party support.)

Agreed, by definition, you are right. However the whole "Linux is free therefore it can't be good" attitude that did exist circa 10 years ago is pretty much dead these days except for some hardcore MS customers who are blind to the real world.

The $10k for ultimate thou is for the entire Microsoft ecosystem. Every version of Windows, every version of Office, every version of products I've never even heard about.

Its not for C#.

Also to say that its not first party support is a little disingenuous as ultimately one would never say pick a messaging queue that implemented AMQP because it wasn't first party. C# is an ECMA standard. AFAIK the mono compiler has no issues implementing it as well as the Microsoft msbuild/csc.

For me as to why I wouldn't, its simple. Mono isn't as fast as the JRE on linux for most operations, at least I've not heard it is, and its so far removed from my interests and work to test it. http://reverseblade.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/c-versus-c-versus... I know the mono team have done a lot over work over the last 4 years, but still. I think that is the crushing blow.

Whilst F# support, or TPL or LINQ might make development nicer, I don't think the performance concerns can be adressed.

However, C# has one big thing going for it, unlike java its never tried to install the chuffing "Ask toolbar". Oracle are going to the special hell.

Yes you get pretty much everything (current) with an ultimate license that is only for development (with a minor exception for Office) not production. So while you can fire up a Windows Enterprise dev box you still need a production license for production. This is when Windows starts to get crazy expensive. Price up a 50 physical node cluster running Windows Server 2012 Enterprise and see why people don't want to both with it for such tasks. I have only ever seen a handle of large Windows server clusters and they were all in some way "sponsored" by Microsoft to show off the power of Windows server.

I 100% agree with you on JRE performance.

The Ask Toolbar thing is a pain in the ass. Although it was Sun who started it so blaming Oracle is a bit unfair. It does not excuse Oracle not removing it ASAP though. They don't include it as part of the offline installer, only the stub installer so it can be avoided at least.

Not to nitpick, but VS Ultimate should be unnecessary for the 99% of developers who do not need an all-singing, all-dancing IDE, particularly around the integration testing stuff, and also the bundled TFS license. I suspect the pricing for Ultimate also bears some relationship to the price of Mercury/HP LoadRunner.

Windows Enterprise is not needed for compute clusters; AFAIK Microsoft doesn't actively sell any OS products at all for building a compute cluster (only for failover), rather expecting you to do something at the application level.

Anyhow, I'm not arguing that Windows is a fit for folks who need to spin up more instances on demand without a nearly linear increase in OS license costs, but Windows Enterprise and VS Ultimate are pretty unrelated to the concerns of heavy computing.

yes you can! if you have money

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