I believe that thought is narrow-minded because you are not thinking in terms of enterprise. This would probably work in a startup, or maybe even in a mid-size business. But in an enterprise, going to your manager and asking to fire up a linux VM in a Microsoft shop will probably get you reprimanded (or laughed at). I would love to use linux all day, but we can't do it as there is no freedom to. With a Windows port, I could create a business case for it and get a VM provisioned with Windows Server on it within a short period of time. Honestly, as bad as this sounds, money for small things like Windows licenses is not an issue when it comes to enterprise.
Whoa whoa whoa. It's narrow minded to not dance around the narrow mindedness of others?
There is certainly a problem that needs solving here, but it's not Redis on windows.
And it's been very long since I've seen an "enterprise" that didn't already have linux deployments. Can you name a few?
That is a great philosophical question, and different people will have different answers, all valid; however:
> "Installing Linux boxes to run Redis", I can't help but feel he's being a bit narrow-minded.
..
> Why not just tell Linux users to get a Windows box if they want to run that software?
This is not a symmetric win32<->linux case. If you're a win user, and you need Redis, you can run it today, for free, starting 10 minutes from now (30 if you've never done this before and need to download stuff):
download oracle virtualbox; download ubuntu server install, install inside virtualbox inside ubuntu, sudo apt-get install redis-server
And really, that's all there is to it; if you are an experienced windows developer with no Linux experience whatsoever, this will take you all of 30 minutes (25 of which just waiting for downloads). It actually performs quite well; not as well as running directly on iron, but probably not more than 10% slower than a native port that does everything right (The current native ports are 100000% slower during syncing to disk)
If you're a linux user and you want to run a windows-only server, that costs your $100 or so for a retail win7 license, a few hours of downloading and 20-30 minutes of active setup last time I did that. Want to fire that up on 3 developer machines? That would be $200 more, thank you. Reconfigured your virtual box more than 5 times? You have to talk to Microsoft before you can proceed.
So, really, what he offers IS a viable solution for windows developers. Really. Try it before you consider it "narrow minded". You might find the narrow mindedness was not where you expected.
> In fact, lots of software starts out as Windows software and is ported to Linux.
The few I am aware of are picasa and 7zip, of which I only ever use the latter. Do you have more examples?
It's actually significantly harder to port Windows programs to Linux than the other way around, because the Win32 API has about 100 times more functions, and the standard practice (cheerfully supported and encouraged by Microsoft) is to use all of them.