Off to the JCP meeting...

As an OS X-using Java developer, where my code tends to run in production on Solaris and Linux, I'm pretty operating system agnostic. While I wouldn't ever want to develop on anything but OS X, where I also do my basic testing, I'm fairly confident that the code runs pretty much the same everywhere else.

The recent attack on the US State Department's visa system, and thereport suggesting that the reliance on MSFT software poses a security risk makes you think a bit. When you have insecure deployments of computers (not all managed carefully in a secure area), why not mandate an varied distribution of OS's and then push for application software than runs on all? Drive towards OS-agnostic apps, make the OS irrelevant. Not an original idea, I know, but if you assume that security holes exist in all OSs, and provide a infrastructure that isn't vulnerable to one kind of attack, would you avoid incidents like what happened in the State Dept?

It would be a bit more painful (sometimes extremely) for administration - having to support multiple OS's - but hopefully motivate application development on multi-platform environments. Right now, that could be perl, python, etc if that floats your boat, Java of course is another good cross-platform choice, and maybe this would motivate MSFT to make .NET cross-platform for the runtime environment. (They have no motivation to do so right now...) If the US Govt mandated cross-platform application environments, I wonder if that would be a large enough customer to get them to move.