Part of our projects are building Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) for Electronic and Electromechanical systems.

When we first introduct the idea of building the system based on Linux, some people ask "Why Linux?" it seems that most ATE systems today are based on MS-Windows operating system.
I find this very strange as MS-Windows OS isn't known as a very stable one, also it has viruses and many other problems.

An ATE system must be highly reliable as we rely on it to give us accurate result regarding the system we are testing. We can not allow the ATE to fail.

I think the main problem with MS-Windows is the fact that it is not open source so we have no idea how it really works and what happens inside it.

Linux is open source so we can if we really want to look at the source code. In most cases we will not do it but we can be sure that many other people did and thus the code is more reliable.

Linux does not have Viruses. Although one might find few mentions of Viruses for Linux, however no practical implementation of Virus for Linux really exists. Linux was written with security in mind from the beginning. It's architecture is similar to Unix which is a robust operating system which has been around for about 40 years.

All these facts are known to everyone, however they are still reluctant to use Linux on ATE systems. Why is that?

The main reasons seem to be that they are not familiar with programming under linux and think there are no drivers for hardware equipment.
It is true that most manufacturers does not release drivers for Linux system, however Linux is an Open Source Project which means that there is a large community behind it and in many cases there are community maintained drivers which in many cases perform better then the commercial ones.