A couple of years ago, I built a subscriber-access version of the Byte Magazine Web site. I started with two prototypes. One used Windows NT, IIS, and Win32 versions of Perl and the Solid database. The other used Linux, Apache, mod_perl and Solid for Linux. The Linux/Apache solution won out on its technical merits. It was stabler, faster and more manageable. We’ll never know the ultimate outcome, because Byte went out of business just as I was ready to go into production. But, I was set to deploy the most significant application I’d ever built on a system that was (in Sun-speak) 100 percent Pure Open Source.
A couple of years ago, I built a subscriber-access version of the Byte Magazine Web site. I started with two prototypes. One used Windows NT, IIS, and Win32 versions of Perl and the Solid database. The other used Linux, Apache, mod_perl and Solid for Linux. The Linux/Apache solution won out on its technical merits. It was stabler, faster and more manageable. We’ll never know the ultimate outcome, because Byte went out of business just as I was ready to go into production. But, I was set to deploy the most significant application I’d ever built on a system that was (in Sun-speak) 100 percent Pure Open Source.
Why did I even consider NT? At that time, I was more familiar with NT/IIS than with Linux/Apache. But, when Linux and Apache showed me what they could do, they got the job.
I’m not an ideologue though. There’s only one software religion for me: whatever works. I care passionately about Linux, Apache, Perl and other open source technologies, because they enable me to do useful and important things. But, I sometimes worry a bit about the open source movement’s anti-Microsoft rhetoric. It’s fun to bash Microsoft, and they’ve been an easy target for a long time. When Eric Raymond used to tell audiences of Linux advocates that NT 5 would…
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