Startup Lessons From ProductCritic - Why We Run Linux

This is part two of Startup Lessons from ProductCritic. Part One can be found here.

Deciding on the operating system that will host your application has a huge ripple down effect on the rest of your system. There is effectively two options you can choose. Windows or not-Windows which is effectively Linux but not always.

Choosing Windows will almost certainly lead to IIS, SQLServer, and C#/VB.NET and choosing Linux will almost certainly lead to Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby. Yes, you can run ASP.NET under Mono and you can run Ruby on Rails under Windows but doing so I find is an uphill battle. If there is anything that I have learned is that working in the preferred environment makes life a lot easier.

The preferred environment means using the software in the same environment that it was built in. If you work in QA this is a bad idea because little bugs will go unnoticed but as a user it makes things far easier.

Luckily, both OS's have platforms for their preferred environment that are equally capable. There are different costs and skills associated with Windows and Linux but neither will prevent or enable you to be successful. Picking the OS is not a make or break decision.

This means that choosing the OS is probably going to come down to which is the preferred environment for the platform and probably even more likely which OS the developers like more.

For ProductCritic we used Ruby on Rails as the platform. Since Linux is the preferred environment for Rails, the OS decision was pretty much made for us, but there were a number of other reason why I think Linux is a superior platform for startup web sites:

* free and open, why buy an OS when one is free?
* reliable and lightweight, can run on small servers and slices, great uptime
* low cost Virtual Private Hosting is available

These are totally subjective and any strong opinionated Windows developer will come up with an equally favorable list for Windows. Hence the factor of developer preference. Ultimately we picked Linux because I like it more and that should make sense to anyone!

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