The Register has a story about a whitepaper posted by Security Officethat was written by a member of the MS Windows 2000 Server Product Group. The whitepaper analyzes the move of MS acquisition Hotmail from FreeBSD to Win2K. The startling conclusion (startling only in that a Microsoft employee wrote the document) is that the most compelling reason for choosing Windows 2000 over FreeBSD to run the Hotmail service is that Microsoft owns Windows 2000. In most other categories, Brooks concluded that FreeBSD was a superior operating system.
It’s a great read for people like me who are so unfortunate as to have to manage a Win 2K server. Currently, I run RedHat 8 in a VM with Win 2K server as the host. I have to stop the Linux VM often to apply Win 2K critical updates, which always insist that the machine must be rebooted. When I get the time, I plan to reverse the situation and use RedHat as the host and primary testbed for my J2EE apps and use Win 2k only as necessary for certification testing. That will drastically improve the manageability and reliability of my testbed.