The Inquisitor wrote
Seems Linux is not as good as we all thought:
Vulnerabilities
Myth - "Windows has more Security Vulnerabilities than Linux/Unix"
Reality - "Between January 2005 and December 2005 there were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities"
Im glad Im sticking to windows :-)
The comparison is flawed. The 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities are counting vulnerabilities found in Linux kernel and those found in open source software which is not part of the kernel but which is usually bundled with it in the so called "Linux distributions".
When we said above that "Linux isn't the best operating system ever made", we were referring to other alternatives which have not profited from the media buzz (as Linux did), namely:
* FreeBSD which has a better internal design in comparison with Linux (and is years ahead of it when it comes to networking speed for example). FreeBSD is powering Yahoo since its debut in 1995 and is used by several heavy traffic sites and systems (
http://www.freebsdsystems.com/chronical-report.php ). FreeBSD was also used by Hotmail (Microsoft took years to migrate it to Windows after buying the free mail service).
* OpenBSD which is the only operating system claiming "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!"
http://www.openbsd.org/ .
* Darwin (the core operating system inside MacOS X) which is based on an advanced micro-kernel architecture (resulting of years of research done in the 80s and the 90s -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_kernel ) while Linux is using the ol' good architecture of the first UNIX system designed in the early 70s. It's interesting to read that someone expressed the same criticism about Linux back in 1992 when its most up-to-date version was 0.12 (!!):
http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/mhonarc-files/obsolete/msg00000.html . The criticism is by Andy Tanenbaum whose book about operating systems design inspired and taught Linus Thorvalds and most of Linux hackers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tanenbaum . In Darwin, a driver cannot take down the whole system as it is run as a normal application monitored by the kernel. In Linux, drivers run in the kernel space and can do what they want (including executing bad code and crashing your computer - By the way, the same problem affects most other open source UNIX flavors).