This is from any email I sent explaining my side on the best operating system to program on. I though it was interesting enough as it hashes up a bunch of feelings I know friends of mine have. Might sound a little bit more evangelistic (if thats the right word for it) that I orginally intented but I think its still a good read. Enjoy. :-)

“Honestly, I really don’t have a side. I have what I want on ether system now days to program efficently and I can make anything do anything I want on ether system so it really doesn’t effect me as much as it does the with the advocates of the operating systems might make out.

The main foundation of the reason I work on top of GTK+, glib, and Mono is that I believe in it because its platform independent, and I’m not on the side of the OS vendor but the side of the programmers who I don’t want to see taking part in the OS deciding battle as most are forced to that use technologies only provided by a single OS. I really don’t care about my customers not using open source operating systems (although I do like the security it provides to me as I can patch holes myself on my own systems), but I love the fact that the library I use for porting from system to system is open source (but not open source as in GPL because that is really to restrictive but open source as in public domain, X11, BSD, and LGPL) because it means that another company I can’t control can’t get its hands in where my software I’m writing can go or can’t go or what it can or can’t do.

It gives me the ability to let my customers choose the OS they want and if they don’t want to use Windows or FreeBSD or Solaris later they can switch without loosing my software which is better for me and my customers. It also gives me the ability to package as closed source for anything I want but retain that freedom as well. Also one of the greatest advantages is that if it doesn’t do what I want it to do in the library or its broken in some way, I can change it or reuse its code somewhere else that I come up with, unlike Java or many other libraries in the same catagory. Who can’t see the benefit in that? “