Whitehouse.gov goes Drupal – this was a headline on all technology blogs. This alone is a huge step for Drupal. It has proved itself and the debates like Drupal vs. Joomla or Drupal vs. Wordpress are now over. Buytaert’s followers will just go “yes we can”.

But it’s also a big day for Open Source as a whole since the Whitehouse.gov website runs now on a LAMP solution. And if it’s good enough for the WhiteHouse, then it’s good enough for companies.

Back in the days, Microsoft’s solutions were considered to be the (only) “safe choice” for IT managers to make. Linux servers or open source implementations were considered to be…experimental at best, and that if you want a bullet-proof and reliable infrastructure you should always go with Microsoft. In reality nothing could be further from the truth, as most Microsoft servers I’ve encountered so far were inferior to their Linux/Unix/Macintosh counterparts.

The FUD that Linux and open source are not suitable for big companies or governments has received today a(nother) blow. I consider that this move should be widely imitated by governments in Europe, as it will create jobs here and we won’t spend billions of euros importing software from the US.

Nowadays, a lot of the battle between technologies takes place in the field of marketing. It all started with Apple’s “Hi, I am Mac/Hi, I am a PC” commercials.

(more from that came here). This investment in marketing boosted Apple’s market share, biting from Microsoft’s, mainly in the youth market.

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After losing the battle for world domination, Microsoft came up with a new idea: PHP on Windows. While I was reading the following paragraph:

PHP is the language that runs the web, however, for a long time; PHP had a reputation of poor performance on Windows. Thanks to the hard work of the PHP Windows team and help from their friends in Redmond, Windows is now a first class citizen for PHP deployment as well as development. We asked two of the Core Windows PHP developers what they thought about the progress that PHP had made on Windows.

…I kept hearing in my head the words of a Microsoft evangelist telling me that PHP is just a child play and “real” applications are built upon the .NET framework. Tell that to Facebook, mister evangelist!

I don’t think that this desperate attempt to get people to switch from Linux to Windows will have any success. The transition costs are enormous, too huge to even be considered. And I don’t mean MS licenses. Most of the PHP applications are bundled with bash scripts, they work with Linux mail servers as sometimes programmers “pipe” incoming mails to a PHP script and so on. All these features must be ported to Windows. All user groups in /etc/passwd with their associated rights through out the file-system must be ported to Windows. All the system administrators that are required to run those servers must be trained to work on Windows.
And why? Because Microsoft says it’s faster this way? Get the facts )