Pop Quiz

Try to guess which OS we're talking about here:

"You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it, add some services and things like that. Because of the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break. We see that in the labs all the time, and our customers see that as well."

It's a Microsoft employee flinging mud at Linux, of course. But let's be honest: he could just as easily be takling about Windows. How many times has a Windows machine barfed because you installed A and it broke B? Or, better still, you installed B and now Windows won't shut down correctly anymore?

No, really. How many times? Because I stopped counting. And it's not just Windows 98, either. I have all sorts of goofy problems because one Windows box uniquely misbehaves and the others don't. This isn't hypothetical. This is stuff I deal with regularly, as recently as today: A Windows service that crashes at shutdown. A service that fails to run at startup but works just fine if you start it manually 60 seconds later. I've got VNC running on half a dozen machines, and it's just this one Windows 2000 Server that barfs at the thought of doing file transfers.

So go fuck yourself, Martin Taylor, General Manager of Platform Strategy. Here's another one:

"There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do."

My reply?

1. Encrypted remote administration
2. A powerful, feature-rich shell
3. SSH

Let's look at your offerings:

1. Remote Desktop — it's a bandwidth hog, and using it on a server OS requires me to buy more licenses. Don't tell me otherwise: I've tried it on a Windows Server 2003 machine and it won't work any other way.
2. Monad — it's still in beta, and it will be wonderful. But you said "today". Today you have cmd.exe. I laugh at you.
3. Nothing!

Yeah, great job keeping up with Linux.

Ridiculous.