Home

The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide

The FreeBSD Flagship

In the first section of the Preface, I cite the Microsoft-owned Hotmail service as an example of a major production facility that uses FreeBSD. Several reviewers pointed out that after Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft, they commenced a program to eliminate all usage of FreeBSD and replace it with Windows 2000, and that citing Yahoo as being entirely run on FreeBSD (which it is) would be a better cite.

I rejected this purely for political reasons. Most people aren't aware of this, but Microsoft itself extensively used BSD UNIX for years for Internet serving through the Windows NT 3.51 days. This continued well into the Windows NT 4.0 days, although during that time the company began hard efforts to switch away from BSD UNIX to NT. This was not done because NT was technically superior but rather because Microsoft wanted to "eat their own dog food" as the industry line goes.

The upshot of this is present even today. Microsoft uses Conexxion as their principal offsite FTP service to distribute upgrades of Microsoft Internet Explorer and other programs, purely for this reason. It is simply because NT 4.X and even Windows 2000 is not capable of serving such a large volume of files onto the public Internet. Other companies, such as Walnut Creek/BSDi and Sun, have no problems distributing just as large an amount of data because they use UNIX. Microsoft has mandated that this kind of file update only occur over NT/Win2K. As a result, it takes an entire plant stuffed to the gills with NT servers to accomplish the same thing that only a few UNIX servers are needed to do. After all, when the work is continually subdivided, eventually the limits of NT's abilities are reached. Because of having to involve so many NT servers, it turns what would be a simple task under UNIX into a giant task involving hundreds of people. In short, it cannot be done in-house anymore and must be turned over to an entirely separate company that specializes in distributing large quantities of files with Windows platforms. While every other major company that uses UNIX like Solaris or the FreeBSD operating system can distribute large numbers of files over the Internet without a lot of expense and effort, Microsoft--purely for marketing reasons--has to hamstring themselves and spend millions of unnecessary dollars. The fact that they admit this and were unable to redesign Hotmail into an Windows-only service deserves to be made obvious.

The final word on the Hotmail affair is this: FreeBSD is used as the "front end" mail processing part of the service. Sun's Solaris is used as the "back end" mail processing part of the service. Only the FreeBSD front-end has been replaced with Windows. Microsoft still cannot get Windows 2K to be powerful enough to replace the Solaris UNIX back-end.

© Copyright 2000-2003 Ted Mittelstaedt. All rights reserved.