Too Many MS Linux Distors Create Open Proprietary Source Mess

Just spotted an article, on Slashdot I think called: Too Many Linux Distros Make For Open Source Mess.

There is actually, maybe, 7 distributions that are of value, the rest are hobby projects or are designed for embedded devices… Anyway, many Linux distros, Open Source mess, blah, blah, blah, I am a Windows fanboy, why doesn’t anybody love me?

That’s great but has anybody actually thought about the same scenario with MS Windows?

Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 SP1
Windows Server 2003 SP1 R2
…

Ladies and gentleman please note that above is a single OS version. That’s right, one OS many choices, as apposed to many OS types but consistency within each version. How is that not messy? It’s messy, it’s ugly and most of all it is almost unmanageable when introduced into corporate IT environment.

You are probably thinking what the hell, they are incremental updates and we should always be using the latest (and greatest), patched version of the OS available from the vendor. As nice as it sounds coming from a lecturer, product vendor or a systems administrator looking after a huge total of 10 machines, this is not how it works in companies running mission critical software (the type that’s allowed few minutes down time per year).

Why?

Because MS (and most others, but I am bitch slapping MS today) does not completely understand nor wants to understand the meaning of consistency, even though they brag how great they are at backwards compatibility. Many moons ago I thought so too. Experience on the other hand, from actually working with it changed my opinion entirely.

For example, I work on a very large software project. Enormous code base, QA team (yay, that’s where I am) alone is larger then some medium sized companies and we run into this type of issues constantly!

Something that worked great on 2003 all of a sudden stopped working on 2003 SP1.
Something that works on 2003 SP1 collapsed in a flaming pile of dog shit after R2 update.

This is not normal and unmanageable in a large software environment.

Taking into account that the deployment (i.e. system installation) time of large software may take anywhere from half a year to many years – it gets really, really hard to “just fix the issues (as they crop-up)” that are caused by inconsistent and backwards incompatible OS updates.

I know (and worked with) customers that are still running Solaris 6. In fact I was the poor bastard who had to hunt (and install) that dinosaur for issue replication. That’s right, the hardware it self is now considered an antique and they are not small companies, they can definitely afford a new server box. So why are they using an outdated version of OS? Because 1. It works how THEY want it to work. 2. Because a new update from the vendor could potentially influence (and compromise) the entire environment that is built to support a single system. By the way, this is Solaris we are talking about. Compared to Windows it’s a mountain of stability and they speak of many different Linux distributions creating an Open Source mess? Why don’t they first look at Windows?

One OS, many versions – it even sounds unnatural. Now try working on a software project that is required to work on all of them.