Robert A. Uhl

You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.

Not that Linux — or even Unix — is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS. The remaining midrange OSes like IBM i might not be a bad fit either.

The problem with Windows is not simply that it’s shoddy: all software has bugs, generally lots of them (Lord knows Linux has plenty). The problem is that it’s not resilient to those bugs, and that one has a great deal of difficult working around those bugs and flaws. Unix really isn’t that great in and of itself but one can extend it and massage it into shape; Windows isn’t that great (although the operating system itself — I don’t mean the user interface — might actually be better), but what you see is more or less what you’re going to get.

04 February 2018: updated URL