How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters | Hacker News Reader

How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters

techflash.com

9 pointsspahl6 comments

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.

>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.

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

I guess I can use this somewhere.

well we know it happened at least once in this universe

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.)

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.

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