Windows or Linux?

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Windows or Linux?
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By Doug Kaye
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This story appeared in the July/August 2004 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.
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July 29, 2004 — It’s the first question
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you ask: Windows or Linux? Some hosts specialize in one platform, while
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others offer both and attempt to present them with equal opportunity.
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The Apache-to-IIS ratio has risen to 4:1
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according to Netcraft, but the trend appears to have stalled since the
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beginning of this year. By the end of 2004, however, I believe the gap
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between Windows and Linux will resume its widening, and a few years
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down the road I expect Linux will become the de facto standard hosting
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platform. I see two causes of this trend: first, the economics of the
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LAMP platform (the all-open-source combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL
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and either PHP, Perl or Python), and secondly, though it won the
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browser wars, Microsoft no longer wants you to develop Web-based
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applications.
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For the past year and a half, Doc Searls,
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senior editor of Linux Journal, has been preaching what he calls
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Do-It-Yourself IT. DIY-IT isn’t the same as open-source, the latter
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being more involved with licensing and community. Rather DIY-IT is a
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new take on the old buy-versus-build strategy. Doc believes that as
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software becomes more of a commodity, like building materials in the
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construction industry, power is shifting from the software vendors to
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their customers, and it is becoming increasingly viable for customers
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to build their own solutions rather than buy them from vendors.
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In the late 1990s, the supply and demand
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ratio for programmers was quite abnormal. In some regions, most notably
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Silicon Valley, it was virtually impossible to hire top talent at any
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price, and retaining employees was equally as challenging. An IT
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manager had to make do with a smaller staff with a lower skill set, yet
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still had to pay top dollar. The result was that vendors could make the
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case for packaged software products that they’d never be able to sell
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under normal circumstances. Open-source software wasn’t economically as
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attractive as pre-packaged solutions because open-source projects were
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more labor intensive, and labor was in short supply. Doc Searls might
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refer to this as the pre-fab era of software construction.
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But in 2000 the pendulum swung the other
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way. Almost overnight, it became much easier to find great people who
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had learned a tremendous amount about Web-based development during the
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dot-com boom. Where there had been a dearth of programmers with even
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basic skills, now there were legions well trained in the open-source
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arts. Once again DIY became practical. At the same time, the LAMP
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platform began to stabilize and standardize, making the build option
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look even better in comparison to still-expensive proprietary solutions
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such as the Microsoft platform.
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When an open-source programmer moves from
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one job to another he can often take his personal set of tools and
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scripts with him, and when you hire a Linux programmer, he often
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arrives with a complete toolkit. In the Microsoft world, the employer
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usually supplies the tools because they’re not free. In a world where
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tools and components cost real money, most choices are exclusionary:
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you select A or B. But when they’re free, you can have them all. You
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get to use “the right tool for the right job” instead of making do with
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a bad choice just because you’ve already paid for it. The economic
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advantage of the LAMP platform continues to grow two dimensionally
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because all of the tools are freely available to an increasingly large
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population of developers.
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In addition to the natural gravitational
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pull toward a free and standardized platform, I expect Microsoft to
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hasten its own exit from the Web hosting marketplace. In an essay
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entitled How Microsoft Lost the API War, Joel Spolsky points out that
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Microsoft is discouraging the Web as a platform. In order to survive,
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the company needs to encourage rich-client architectures (like Windows)
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in lieu of Web-based applications. As Joel points out, Microsoft has
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essentially abandoned enhancements to DHTML and other browser-based
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technologies. He writes, “The big meme at Microsoft these days is
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‘Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.’ You see that
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somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn.” Microsoft is
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wooing developers away from the Web and back to the desktop because
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it’s the only way the company can make money, and why I believe it will
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ultimately lose the hosting-platform business.
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Five years from now, will we continue to
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see parity between the Microsoft and open-source platforms? From
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reading and speaking with some very smart people like Doc and Joel,
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I’ve come to the conclusion that the trends are not stable, and that we
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are, in fact, approaching a tipping point that will ultimately shift
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the hosting market substantially toward the open-source platform.
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So why has the Apache-to-IIS ratio been
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flat for six months? Perhaps it’s due to the litigiousness of SCO and
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the FUD it has created in the marketplace. It’s remarkable how much one
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small vendor can damage an entire marketplace. But make no mistake
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about it: the SCO situation is temporary. I hope it will be resolved by
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the end of this year, but it could drag into next. In any case, once
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SCO goes away, the curves will again diverge.
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