[ Thanks to Nobody for this link. ]
“Less well known than its market-share gains are the far more
rapid gains Linux is making on Microsoft in the number of “known
vulnerabilities” in its code. Linux zealots for years have insisted
that the operating system is an invulnerable perpetual motion
machine, incapable of crashing or being infested by the kinds of
worms and viruses that hackers are constantly sending
Microsoft-powered servers. This boast has been easy to make, since
until 1999 Linux was too much of a fringe product to stand up to
the kind of abuse more widely used systems endure.”
“But now comes news from BugTraq that gives the lie to the
widely held belief that Linux is any less vulnerable than its
competitors. Linux’s known weaknesses turn out to be proliferating
faster than its market share. BugTraq publishes “Vulnerability
Database Statistics” (a list of bugs, essentially, that are
discovered each year in various software products) that
demonstrate rather dramatically how determined Linux is to join the
Big Leagues — if not necessarily in market share, then in what
might be called “vulnerability share.”
“BugTraq is careful to preface its list with a long list of
qualifiers… All that aside, though, one conclusion is
inescapable: If you look this list over, and measure each system’s
number of vulnerabilities against the number of its customers,
Linux is arguably the worst operating-system product in history,
and Microsoft’s the best. As Linux zealots are beginning to find
out, it’s a lot easier to masquerade as a better product than it is
to go out and be one.”