London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux:
When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.
Today Microsoft released some GPL driver code for Linux for some hardware. Why? Well, so that the hardware could be better virtualized in a VM running Linux on a Windows host. Yippee. Well I’m sure this will help some people. It does mean that FLOSS is influencing them, and that is a good thing.
In contrast, the FSF made a press release last Thursday, quoted below in its entirety. So Microsoft is trying to win people over, whether it’s with really useful stuff or not, it is Free this time… and the FSF is just yelling at people. Who’s going to make more friends here?
Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it’s safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it’s nowhere near enough to make C# safe.
### Why Worry About C#? ###
Since we published Richard’s article about Mono[1] last week, some people have been asking us why we’re expressing special concern about free software developers relying on C# and Mono, instead of other languages. Sun probably has patents that cover Java. Maybe IBM has patents that cover C compilers. “Shouldn’t we discourage the use of these too?” they ask.
Nice collection of the Top 50 Linux Quotes of All Time… loads of fun. #17. More in the comments, like “Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.” and “Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.” — both from Linus Torvalds. I looked back at our most-linked piece in the archives to see what might be quotable: “Free review copies are provided by book publishers and software companies, and have been for aeons. I can’t say for sure, but Gutenburg probably gave away review copies of the Bible, so this is nothing new. …are good reviews ‘bought’ for Linux distributions? Hard to imagine when most of the product is free anyway. …Did we received a free copy? Yes, it’s called a download”.
