How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters

[Nishant | निशाँत]

There is an interesting set of comments and the author's answers at
the source of the article:
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/06/How_a_Microsoft_veteran_learned_to_love_Linux_and_why_it_matters_48542167.html.

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How a Microsoft veteran learned to love Linux, and why it matters

by Keith Curtis on Thursday, June 18, 2009, 9:28am PDT

[Editor's Note: Reprinted with permission from "After The Software
Wars," a new book in which former Microsoft employee Keith Curtis
explores the intersection between the worlds of proprietary and free
software. The full book is available for purchase
(http://www.amazon.com/After-Software-Wars-Keith-Curtis/dp/0578011891/)
and download (http://www.lulu.com/content/4964815).]

I first met Bill Gates at the age of twenty. He stood in the yard of
his Washington lakefront home, Diet Coke in hand, a tastefully small
ketchup stain on his shirt, which no one had the courage to point out,
and answered our questions, in-turn, like a savant. As a college
summer intern, I had planned for a potential encounter and I
approached him with questions that interested me but which would be
arcane to non-computer mortals.

His answers demonstrated that he was one of the top software experts
on the planet and convinced me that I would be very wise to start off
my career at Microsoft.

I joined Microsoft in 1993 when it was hitting its stride. It had
recently released Windows 3.1 and Windows NT, setting itself on the
path of more than a decade of dominance in the PC operating system
market, and the many other markets that flow from it. I worked as a
programmer for 11 years in various different groups — on databases,
Windows, Office, MSN, mobility, and research.

One day it just hit me — I should quit.

There were no big reasons, only a lot of little ones. I had just
launched v1 of the client and server side of the Microsoft Spot watch,
and while it contained sophisticated technologies, I didn’t really
believe it would take off in the marketplace. I had gained lots of
knowledge yet only understood the Microsoft world. I was making decent
money, but had no time to enjoy it. Though my boss was happy with me,
I was losing motivation to just keep doing the same thing I had been
doing for over a decade. When I looked around the company I saw a lot
of ancient codebases and unprofitable ventures.

Like many of my fellow employees, I was only vaguely familiar with
free software when I left and decided to try Linux on a lark. At
Microsoft, I got all the software I wanted for free, and I always
thought free software would be behind proprietary software. For 15
years I had made it a priority to learn about many aspects of
Microsoft technologies, and my office contained rows of books on
everything from Undocumented Windows to Inside SQL Server. When
running Windows I felt as comfortable as Neo in the Matrix, without
the bullets and leather, so while I was willing to look around, I was
half-forcing myself and didn't want this little experiment to mess up
my main computing environment.

Every technical decision was big for me: which version of Linux should
I try? Should I get an extra machine or can I try this dual-boot
thing? Can I really trust it to live on the same hard drive as
Windows? I got some tips and assurance from a Microsoft employee who
had already tried Linux, and with that, and the help of Google, I
proceeded with the installation of Red Hat's Fedora Core 3.

While I came to not be all that thrilled with Fedora itself, I was
floored merely by the installation process. It contained a graphical
installer that ran all the way to completion, it resized my NTFS
partition — which I considered a minor miracle, setup dual boot, and
actually did boot, and let me surf the Web. I didn’t have a clue what
to do next, but the mere fact that this all worked told me more about
the potential of Linux than anything I had read so far. You cannot, by
accident, build an airplane that actually flies.

However, as I dug deeper, I also started to realize that while Linux
had a tremendous amount of potential and is doing well on the server
and other specialized scenarios, it was not on a trajectory to take
over the desktop, which is the most important use of computers, and
this book will discuss its remaining challenges.

The Linux Kernel

The kernel of an operating system (OS) is the central nervous system
of a computer. It is the first piece of software that the computer
executes, and it manages and mediates access to the hardware. Every
piece of hardware needs a corresponding kernel device driver, and you
need all of your drivers working before you can run any of your
software. The kernel is the center of gravity of a software community,
and the battle between free software and Windows is at its lowest
level a battle between the Linux and Windows kernels. Microsoft has
said that it has bet the company on Windows, and this is not an
understatement! If the Windows kernel loses to Linux, then Microsoft
is also lost.

The Linux kernel is not popular on desktops yet, but it is widely used
on servers and embedded devices because it supports thousands of
devices and is reliable, clean, and fast. Those qualities are even
more impressive when you consider its size: printing out the Linux
kernel's 8,000,000 lines of code would create a stack of paper 30 feet
tall! The Linux kernel represents 4,000 man-years of engineering and
80 different companies, and 3,000 programmers have contributed to
Linux over just the last couple of years.

That 30-foot stack of code is just the basic kernel. If you include a
media player, web browser, word processor, etc., the amount of free
software on a computer running Linux might be 10 times the kernel,
requiring 40,000 man-years and a printout as tall as a 30-story
building.

This 40 man-millennia even ignores the work of users reporting bugs,
writing documentation, creating artwork, translating strings, and
other non-coding tasks. The resulting Linux-based free software stack
is an effort that is comparable in complexity to the Space Shuttle. We
can argue about whether there are any motivations to write free
software, but we can't argue that it's already out there — so there
must be some!

One of the primary reasons I joined Microsoft was I believed their
Windows NT (New Technology) kernel, which is still alive in Windows
Vista today, was going to dominate the brains of computers, and
eventually even robots. One of Bill Gates' greatest coups was
recognizing that the original Microsoft DOS kernel, the source of most
of its profits, and which became the Windows 9x kernel, was not a
noteworthy engineering effort. In 1988, Gates recruited David Cutler
from Digital Equipment Corporation, a veteran of ten operating
systems, to design the product and lead the team to build the Windows
NT kernel, that was released as I joined in 1993.

Windows has become somewhat popular for servers and devices, but it
never achieved the dominance it did on desktop PCs. Perhaps the
biggest reason is that its code wasn't available for others to extend
and improve upon. The Linux kernel took off because there is a huge
number of people all over the world, from Sony to Cray, who tweaked it
to get it to run on their hardware. If Windows NT had been free from
the beginning, there would have been no reason to create Linux.

However, now that there is the free and powerful Linux kernel, there
is no longer any reason but inertia to use a proprietary kernel.

Excerpted from "After the Software Wars"
(http://www.amazon.com/After-Software-Wars-Keith-Curtis/dp/0578011891/)
by Keith Curtis.
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