[ Thanks to Gene
Alexander for this link. ]
“You know, the time in the near future when “Once
‘Linux’ is (as|more) popular (as|than) ‘Windows’ it will start
getting all those viruses too.”“First off, the problem with that statement is that there is no
single homogeneous ‘Linux’ to be attacked, meaning GNU/Linux of
course, as there is a single ‘Windows’ to be attacked. There are
several hundred distributions of GNU/Linux all with differing
release versions of software and underlying software libraries. The
very heterogeneous nature of the GNU/Linux ecosystem makes creating
a far reaching automatic malware attack difficult to unlikely.
While one may find a way to automatically attack a large user base
of a single distribution, like that of Ubuntu, the attack will not
likely work across all or even most other GNU/Linux distributions
due to the diverse nature of the versions of included software.“Calls from people without and within the FLOSS community to
create a “single Linux” or to standardise all distributions are a
danger to the security that is inherent in the healthy
heterogeneity of GNU/Linux. No, I do not mean “security through
obscurity”, I mean security through diversity.”