Last September, the London Stock Exchange was down for the good part of a day due to a crash in the Windows .NET framework which resulted in the loss of almost a day’s worth of trading. So now the LSE has decided to jump ship to Linux, in hopes that it will provide with better system reliability, and because the software it was running, TradElect, never achieved the performance that the LSE wanted. Quite frankly, this makes a ton of sense.
Forget that Windows is a Microsoft product, and just compare it to a car. If you need a car to get yourself to work and yours isn’t working, you’re going to go out and buy a new one. If you need your car to get millions of employees to work (yeah, that’s a big car) and the car is a lemon, you’re definitely going to get a new one. Lucky for the London Stock Exchange, they don’t have to pay for the purchase of a new car, but that’s not to say that using Linux will be free. The price will come in the form of keeping a capable IT staff trained in the open source operating system on hand.
In a way, it’s quite surprising that something as big and as public as a stock exchange was ever running Windows. With popularity comes exploits, and there are almost certainly more exploits for Windows than there are for any other system. Linux, on the other hand, is nowhere near as compromised by a rampant environment of hackers. That said, it seems like a security concern in and of itself that the LSE’s new backbone has been made so public, though it’s a lot better than having hackers know that Windows is keeping a good part of an economy afloat.
