The short answer is "the same things are that great about Unix".
Briefly:
1. It comes with source code, the most powerful support tool known.
Unix/Linux users don't have to report bugs to clueless phone-answering
droids who then mis-transcribe them, incorrectly categorize them, and
hand them off to overworked software teams who ignore them for years
at a time. They just fix them.
2. It scales. No OS in the history of computing has a history of
scalability like Unix/Linux, which has run on everything from Z80s
to Crays. Unix/Linux has also had support for multiprocessor
systems since 1980 (George Goble/Mike Marsh Dual-CPU Vax 11/780)
and support for MIMD multiprocessor systems since 1987 (16-CPU
Sequent Balance).
3. It's robust and reliable. Contrast with other operating systems
which are frequently crashed by application software. Note that
Unix/Linux systems have a *long* track record of staying up until
somebody deliberately takes them down.
4. It is not a single-vendor OS. There are at least half a dozen
major varieties of free Unix/Linux implementations to choose from.
Healthy competition between these drives innovation and prevents
ruthless domination of the market by any one of them.
5. It is rapidly evolving. No company in the world can muster
a development effort that's within an order of magnitude of that
being put into Unix/Linux 24 hours a day, around the planet.
What they cannot do for money, hundreds of thousands of programmers
are doing for joy.
6. It is THE Internet platform. All significant Internet technologies
have been developed on Unix/Linux (no surprise: Unix was originally
designed as a "programmer's workbench") and there is no reason to
expect this to change. Consider: Usenet news, NNTP, Mosaic (first
GUI browser), Kerberos, archie, gopher, Perl, tcl/tk, HTML, HTTP,
VRML, WAIS, IRC, NFS, SNMP, PGP, Java, LDAP, MIME...and while not
*invented* there, TCP/IP sure came a long way while in the hands of
the CSRG group at Berkeley, who implemented it in the BSD Unix kernel
and were responsible for popularizing it.
7. It is well-designed. Unix's original design, separating kernel
from shell and shell from utilities, isolating device dependencies
into drivers, etc., is such that it's possible to improve/modify
portions of the OS with a high probability that nothing else will
be broken as a consequence.
8. It performs. Unix/Linux squeezes far more performance out of
the hardware than competing OS's. This has been true since the
days when it competed against VMS on Vaxen; it's still true now.
9. It's free.
10. While it's a terrific platform for experimentation, it is
not necessarily a hacker's OS. Given that one recent article in
InfoWorld explained how the author's 10-year-old daughter installed
it in two hours, it's time to drop words like "geek" and "hacker"
from Linux articles. It's as much (and IMHO, more) of a production-grade
OS as anything else available.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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