How Linux is keeping Microsoft honest (and why SBS sucks)

David M Williams
Wednesday, 10 September 2008 20:40

Opinion and Analysis

It’s surprising enough that Microsoft have come out with PowerShell after years of effort spent trying to abolish any need for a command line. It’s a marked twist after the line that one reason to ignore Linux was because the Windows’ visual tools were greater than any command line instructions.

Yet, what’s most surprising and jaw-dropping is that PowerShell is becoming deeply entrenched in Microsoft’s server range. This began with Exchange 2007. The product is maintained and administered via PowerShell commands and functions. A visual console is provided but at heart it simply translates every action into equivalent PowerShell instructions.

In fact, it the console even shows you the instruction it’s going to execute as an educational tool. The developers want to turn back the habits they’ve previously entrenched and now encourage Windows admins to return to the tao of the command prompt along with sequencing instructions to form scripts.

Here’s where it really gets freaky: Windows Server 2008 offers a headless mode without any GUI whatsoever. It’s purely command-line driven. Why have Microsoft done this? It’s fundamentally a response to the Linux way.

The Linux command-prompt is well-entrenched. Linux applications have always respected fundamental design principles that involve applications returning values indicating their success or failure, and emitting output such that it can be fed directly as input to another application.

While an old design, it fits nicely with a modern day situation. Organisations are increasing their server requirements from one or several servers to entire racks full, or even shipping container loads. Server farms have evolved to such scales that it is ludicrous to even think of maintaining them via the traditional KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch. Instead, the sensible admin will automate as many tasks as possible, running commands that operate over many machines at the one time.

This is the type of thing that scripting languages do well; they provide huge time and effort savings. It’s the sort of thing that Linux has always done well and which the Windows philosophy would not lend itself to had it continued on the course it was on. Instead, Microsoft had to adapt and did so by emulating the Linux way.

Let’s also look at the threat of open source vs proprietary software. Microsoft have been susceptible to arguments that Linux vulnerabilities are discovered faster and patched faster because many more independent people can inspect the program code. What’s more, the open source philosophy also engenders confidence and trust – almost mocking Microsoft’s “trustworthy computing” campaign.

SourceForge has become well known as a repository of quality free and open source software. It’s the home of such regarded and famed apps like Filezilla, Azureus, phpMyAdmin and many others.

Microsoft came up with their own SourceForge, called CodePlex, in an effort to reduce the impact of these open source and proprietary arguments. CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site. You can start a new project, join an existing one or download software created by the community.

Yet, there’s some irony here: the software projects available on CodePlex were developed with, and require, such closed-source proprietary development tools as Visual Studio. Nevertheless, and again, CodePlex has come about in response to Linux and the strength of the message it was awakening.

Now let’s look at Windows Small Business Server.

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