Korean Air Mission Critical Systems Moved to Linux

securitas writes "ZDNet is reporting that Korean Air has decided to move its flight-crew scheduling and daily accounting systems to Linux running on an IBM mainframe, and 5000 users will access this information through their browsers starting in September. "

Comments

Re:Flight crew scheduling = "Mission critical" ?

[Slashbotix]

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Thanks for the warning...

[SumDeusExMachina]

...because this has convinced me to never take a Korean Air flight.

I mean, sure, Linux is great for messing around with or running small to mid-sized servers and for rendering farms, due to the fact that it runs fast on commodity hardware, but would you really trust it to run the airline systems?

I really don't trust Linux as far as stability goes. Sure, it beats the hell out of the stability of something like Windows NT, but there are (and have been for a while) commercially developed systems that were designed soley for reliability (QNX and OS/390 come to mind). While you may have philosophical objections to commercial software (it costs money), you can't deny that there it is nevertheless much more stable and reliable due to it's purpose-built nature. We are talking about systems that just don't have downtime. Period. Linux just doesn't quite live up to that task yet.