Halycon Gamma
Caldari
The Flying Tigers
United Front Alliance
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Posted - 2009.02.16 17:31:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: LaVista Vista
Originally by: Rude Bwoy
instead of running a windows 'node' on each blade, incurring Windows license fees / all that patching, why don't you use two whopping big UNIX boxes ?
And you should totally administer it, because you seem to know what you are talking about.
CCP, hire this guy!
Because when CCP decided to build Eve, they decided to be a MS house. Now add in many many years of constant development, and you get lots of microsoft only widgets all over the place. Its not impossible for CCP to one day to suddenly decide "we're gunna run *nix servers!", but the longer and longer you get away from that initial start date of eve, the harder it gets. MS does nothing if not constantly add in more and more MS only non standard commands and ideas to everything it touches. Which in turn CCP would be insane not to implement because some of them really do make work faster and easier.
So you get more and more MS calls in database etc. Until no you simply can't switch because the man hours it would take to restart from scratch on a different platform is a huge undertaking.
Same reason they dropped Linux support, and Apple support could be dropped sooner or later too. By welding themselves to DX and other third party windows apps, they are constantly moving farther and farther away from an OS agnostic system. The company they pay for the wrappers can't actually make it work as well as anyone would want because of licensing that MS won't give. You run into all sorts of IP problems. Since the moment it came out, linux version of Eve has ran better on a third party emulator software than what CCP shipped. Probably similar on the apple side.
I'm not saying all this stuff is bad, it just IS. When CCP started building eve, DX was the latest and greatest thing on the market with the lowest point of entry. OpenGL was in one of its occasional slumps from the committee style of development it uses, and waiting for it to catch up would have taken ages. No-one had too much faith in Linux as a heavy server OS yet, web-server, sure. But people were only just starting to play with it as a dedicated database platform. And true Unix Platforms such as AIX, Solaris, or something similar required huge investments of hardware capital that most people simply can't afford for a startup untested company like CCP; on a game they weren't ever sure would work. x86 servers, with MS as the OS was, and IS, the logical choice.
Now, 8-9 years later, the hardware software market is a completely different world than it was then. But once you've made your choices, your sorta stuck with them unless you want to invest millions of dollars in undoing them. And for now and the immediate future, MS stuff works for them.
Why mess with it?
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