Windows Vs Unix

This is one of the most exhaustively held debates in the IT circle. Everyone of us would have come through this atleast more than once. Isn’t it :) Recently I got into this discussion. So thought of sharing my views on this.

I know there are a lot of people who will immediately raise their hands for LINUX. There is no second say that Linux is far better than Windows in many aspects. But I personally feel that Windows and Linux should not be compared for the below reasons.

1) Windows is a product owned by a company due to which the following factors start influencing its quality --> Target dates to be achieved, limited resources etc. As a software engineer, I can realize that even if the Windows OS team finds a bug, if it doesn’t have time to run the whole time-consuming regression testing, they will just mitigate the risk and release it to the world to face it when they come. A timeline is a timeline and that can never be slipped in business. Even if Microsoft is one of the most profitable companies, it cannot employ infinite resources. Also even if they can lets see an analogy. 10 ppl can complete a task in 10 days…20 ppl may complete it in 5 days… but that doesn’t mean 50 ppl can complete it in one day. Some tasks require actual time with dependencies taken into account and not just man-time computation :)

2) Now coming to the point why is LINUX so robust and superior….. The below explanations from a website were so close to that of my perception…

-> It taps into the true motivation of programmers in a way that corporations often don't. Programmers are like artists ... They like to showcase their best stuff for their peers. In open source, they can. But at most corporations, their best work is hidden behind locked and guarded doors.
-> Because the software is free, there is no pressure to release it before it is really ready just to achieve some sales target. Every version of Linux is declared to be finished only when it is actually finished, which explains why it is so solid.
-> The other reason why free software is better is because the personal reputation of the developer is attached to every release.

3) Among other things, the article said: "...more than 50% of all [CERT] security advisories ... in the first 10 months of 2002 were for Linux and other open-source software solutions." This shows that no operating system is immune to bugs and security issues: As Linux grows in popularity, it will have its own full share of problems.

4) Problems faced by Linux currently........The open source community has fragmented into myriad competing segments, each with its own different, and increasingly quasi-proprietary, distributions of software. Huge numbers of new users of all skill levels have entered what once had been an experts-only enclave. (Even Wal-Mart now sells cheap PCs with Linux and open source applications preinstalled.) It's much harder to produce software for an audience of all skill levels running who-knows-what hardware, than for an audience only of experts running a limited subset of known-good hardware.

5) One more key thing: When the Linux/open source community was tiny, few hackers bothered to look for exploitable issues there. It simply wasn't an attractive target. In other words, it wasn't so much that Linux and similar software were truly free from exploitable holes, but simply that no one was trying to find them.

6) Want to know what Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation feels about this discussion
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2004/10-27platformvalue.mspx

Now I am not coming to conclude that Windows is better than Linux. I only want to point out that Linux is not an elixir. Linux and Windows are two separate entities which cannot be compared as a whole in general as they differ in a lot of attributes. Maybe we can rate either of them higher in one or more properties like robustness, user interface etc… Like we cannot compare and say that an X standard student is more intelligent than a VI standard student, we cannot compare a Small segment Car with a Full-size Car….