Top five things Linux can learn from Microsoft
Jul. 20, 2006
Linux does a lot of things right -- open-source
,
security, reliability -- but it's far from perfect. In fact, Linux and
its vendors could stand to learn a few things from Microsoft. Yes,
Microsoft. Like what? Here's my list of the top five things that Linux
could learn from Microsoft.
1. MSDN
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With Linux and open-source software
,
all the code is open, so any developer can leap right in and start
working. That's grand, but what if you don't know where to start? What
if you're not really sure, or perhaps not too sure, about what's the
right way to program for a given project? What if you want to write
something new and useful... but you discover three months into your
project that you're duplicating work that's been done a dozen times
over?
There are no easy-to-use guides on how to program
successfully in open-source. To learn how to do it right, usually takes
a couple of years of getting to know the lay of the free software
landscape.
With Microsoft, however, there's the
Microsoft Developer Network
(MSDN). MSDN provides developers with help in writing applications
using Microsoft products and programming tools. And, when I say help, I
mean: Help.
There are well-written tutorials, best practices
guides, the latest betas and production copies of operating systems and
software, software development tools, code examples, online
communities, endless articles on the nuts and bolts of Microsoft
programming, and on and on. Best of all, it's all well-organized, so
that you can easily learn what you need when you need to learn it.
MSDN isn't cheap, but for Microsoft developers it's worth every penny. Open-source sites like SourceForge
are very handy, but they're more useful as project incubators than as
educational sites. No, open source and Linux don't have anyt
