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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Even more scary; why do almost all consumer and non-consumer screens like airports, train station, info screens, army rugged laptops, missile guidance systems, most nuclear reactor systems, medical equipment etc run some form of Windows? That's really what I will never get; I hear the excuses from people which I already typed out elsewhere and I know these are bullshit these days. So it must be some kind of MS infiltration tactic? What can they actually offer I wonder besides a 'safe name'? Maybe that's just all there is to it?

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I think support. You have to remember that the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux is from 2002. Back then, the old UNIX vendors were in steady decline, but the freshness of enterprise Linux probably made potential customers weary.

Nowadays, things are really different. Red Hat is large and has a solid track record. IBM has shown its support for Linux over an extensive period. SUSE is now in the hands of a huge IT company.

Consequently, I don't think there is a good excuse in 2014 not to seriously evaluate Linux. In fact, it should be (and often is) the standard option for embedded devices.

> SUSE is now in the hands of a huge IT company

Which one are you referring to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachmate

Ah, I thought SUSE was split off into its own company back when they acquired Novell.

If windows is so bad, we should by now have had a lot of missile disasters, airport disasters, missile guidance disasters, train station disasters, nuclear reactors disasters, etc etc... I have had my share of sightings of crashed ATMs running windows, but I also seem to remember that sometimes the way things are coded crash the OS, and it's not only a windows issue is it?

I'm not saying/did not say Windows is so bad (it was, from a stability standpoint, horrible, but that's a while ago; still people used it then for theses purposes as well...); I was wondering why it's so one-sided. There seem to be little tech reasons to choose one OS over the other currently, so like everyone says, it must be support. But that's moot now as well.

The 'bad' thing now about Windows (and iOS, OS X) I can think of technically at this moment is that it is closed. I would not like to run my company on something closed, especially if there are nuclear reactors, missiles, airports, airplanes, medical crap involved. I want to be able to dive down to the line of code instead of having to ask a vendor why it does what it does. So again, from a tech point of view, I do not understand why any CTO would pick a closed solution over an open, especially when lives are at stake besides him/her covering his/her ass. And that's probably what it usually is; no balls to pick the best thing for humanity (...) even if it's an uphill battle.

You are criticizing 10-20 year old decisions on the basis on what is available today (I am referring to your "currently" phrase)?

Most non-startup companies have a huge tech stack in place. That stack depends in many ways on the OS. If today you win/make a bid for a display in an airport, the first thing you should be asking is "how do I leverage my existing code base". The answer is almost never "by completely switching my OS". Especially in the scenerios being discussed in this sub-thread - lives at stake. I'm going to throw away my multidecade tested code for new code, and call that safer? No, never.

Much (not all) of the code at the company I work at now is Windows based. I'd like to switch away, sort of, but for what? A nebulous "it's open" argument, vs converting man-centuries of work? It makes no sense.

It has nothing to do with "balls", but a cost benefit equation, and a recognition that a 5-10 year old, battle tested OS is pretty darn safe compared to some kernel released in the last 3 months.

I didn't say one should throw out decades of work; for a new company or and old company writing new software it makes sense picking technologies which run everywhere so you have a choice. There is no problem running Win if your admins are Win and most of your code is Win only; that makes a lot of sense. What makes no sense IMHO is picking Win blindly for new software and I find the same goes if you substitute Win with OS X or Linux or whatever.

Also; when you write software, now or in the 80s, late 70s (before that it was a bit harder unless it was Cobol/Fortran or something), you separate the frontend from the backend. I wrote a ton of 'Windows only' (meaning it had to only run on Windows) software for companies in the 90s and 90+% of that C++ or Delphi code compiles fine on Win + Mac + Linux. I will still say it's about balls in choosing your tech if it's not mainstream aka simply blabbering out: Oracle + MS, but more so now; now there isn't much excuse for picking lock-in tech for the most part.

Not sure what the 3-month old kernel is about; those exist in MS/Apple/... as well; who runs prod on that? So what does that even mean?

I see your point. How many lives would you estimate are lost/saved because of what OS is being used? Wouldn't any vendor have a "military" version of whatever OS they would use anyway? Which would make it a lot safer to use.. The NSA probably cracks as many windows machines as they do Linux/Unix all over the world, I would think that it's all the same if you know where to go and what to do to get in.

> I would think that it's all the same if you know where to go and what to do to get in.

It isn't. You have to find completely different loopholes in each implementation of networking stacks to exploit them. Anyone running outdated software is always vulnerable to newer exploits, but the thing with Linux is that is audited by thousands of businesses around the globe, whereas Windows probably has back doors for the NSA through some backdoor dealing with the US gov't and nobody can audit that.

I see. I get it now, it does make a lot of sense.

Support. If you sign a contract with Microsoft saying that they have to support your system for next 15 years, they have to - they are legally obliged to. If you go and download Ubuntu, no one will care about your antique system in 10 years time, you will be told to just move on and upgrade the system - which is very non-trivial in all of these environments listed.

You can buy Linux support contracts from Red Hat, Oracle, IBM, Novell etc etc.

Okay, so I just went to the Red Hat site. Tried to figure out what they offer. It's a mickey mouse site. Oh, they offer "support" for "enterprise linux". Okay, so are they offering support for a 10 year old release of Red Hat? Am I going to get immediate bug fixes to security problems? Am I going to get a modern tool chain that builds my system for that old release? How many engineers, exactly, are focused on that 10 year old platform? And so on.

Whereas if I go to the Microsoft site, I can trivially find support lifecycles, details of what is supported, all of my tools pretty much interoperate (no breaking changes), it is easy to download from MSDN whatever set of technologies I need for any version of software, and so on.

I realize I am being unfair - I am familiar with MS support, and not with Red Hat support, so obviously it will be easier for me to find this stuff. But, consider me your average CTO. I don't think the case has been made for long term support of OS as host for my applications (we are, after all, talking about buying an OS to host my applications, not support for servers, which RH is very good at, of course). Hard questions that a CTO should be asking, and I suspect the answers are not going to be good.

Try an embedded-focused company, like Wind River or Timesys.

Exactly. And you have to pay for them, just as you have to pay for Microsoft's support contract. So really, if you have to pay for either, it's only a question of which company gives you the best deal. Also, I am pretty sure MS will be around in 15 years - Red Hat, not so much.

Red Hat is a 21 year old billion dollar tech company. Unless they do something catastrophically stupid (that can just as soon sink MS, like the Windows 8 bullshit is destroying their bottom line) they will absolutely be around.

Microsoft has 15-16 billion dollar businesses[1]. The realm of mistakes that might sink Red Hat is quite a bit different than the realm of mistakes that would sink Microsoft.

[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-businesses...

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