linux choice list
I owe an apology to readers of The Register in my last comments on article about “Windows Server 2012 kicks ass”, which came across as incoherent and convoluted.
This was a result of my extreme frustration with several obviously Microsoft partisan commenters, responded to my comment with totally illogical , devious and flat out technically false statements that would turn any calm person blue.
In my initial comment, I indicated that the entities listed below had selected Enterprise Linux over “any” iteration of Microsoft Windows - from 2003 through 2008/2008R2 to 2012 for very high priority major projects and/or for their general Operation System (OS) infrastructure as well.
Not one of the dissenters challenged these entities as their reasons for choice of Linux or *BSD/UNIX over Windows OS, or could they, only rushing to attack me personally as a “UNIX Zealot”. Shooting the messenger without addressing the message seems to be a serious affliction in the American society.
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Criteria most always cited included by those in list - Reliability, Flexibility, Performance, Scalability, Security and to to a much less degree better Return on Investment (ROI)/Total cost of Ownership, or some combination thereof.
IBM - Watson Super computer – winner of the Jeopardy Game Ultimate Challenge
Z-series Mainframe Computers
PowerLinux and Power 7 Servers
Cisco - “Unified Computing” Servers, plus all medium and some higher range Routers
NASA - Mars Curiosity Mars Mission, costing over $400 million, as well previous Mars and Last Mon rover Missions.
Stock Exchanges - NASDAQ, NY Stock Exchange, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, London Stock exchange, Singapore Exchange, National Stock Exchange of India, Deutsche Borse, Tokyo Stock Exchange and others. The London Stock Exchange made unflattering statements after several very high profile failures of Microsoft technologies (and OS) in 2010.
Top500 - The top 500 most powerful Supercomputers in existence, of which approximately 94% run Linux or UNIX/BSD.
Cern - World renown Swiss Particle Physics Laboratory that recently discovered the “Higgs Boson” or “God Particle”.
Amazon - All of Amazon On-line Services infrastructure and EC2 Cloud Services. Windows customer cloud services are run in Virtualization.
Facebook - The entire foundation of Facebook technology is Linux OS based.
Netflix - FreeBSD based appliances stream millions of movies to customers per week.
Google - The entire infrastructure of Google is Linux OS based.
Oracle - Runs Solaris and their own “Unbreakable Linux” for the entire company.
Yahoo - Yahoo has for many years run it's network on FreeBSD and Linux OS.
Twitter - The complete back end operation of Twitter is Linux OS based.
Linked-In - Similar arrangement as Twitter above.
US Dept. of Energy
National Research Laboratories - Oakridge National Labs, Lawrence Livermore and others.
Airlines - Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, others.
Boeing - Linux and UNIX for advanced Aircraft design and development.
Animation studious - Pixar, Disney Studios, Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks and others.
Most all of the Animation movies since Toy Story were created with Linux design and rendering.
US Dept. of Defense & DARPA - weapons design and testing, Naval vessels, Artillary. Satellite and Space equipment and technology, Cyber Security.
A portion of the many dozens, even hundreds of companies relying on Linux OS for major projects and in many cases all of their infrastructure: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
There are probably two hundred plus more bug guys and many hundreds of small entities that could be mentioned.
They all can't be wrong