ouch!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick May 20, 2009 4:57 PM EDT |
Man, reading that is like getting whipsawed. They kept trying to say OSS (notice the glaring absence of the F) presents just as juicy a target as MS-ware, except that it doesn't, so OSS adoption should be very careful and scary, except that proprietary software has a much worse security record, so you better watch out for that bad OSS. Except for it being better. |
| caitlyn May 20, 2009 5:03 PM EDT |
That pretty much sums it up. The Microsofties FUD tactics have always included the idea that Linux (or UNIX or MacOS) really isn't more secure. Since nobody uses Linux nobody bothers to attack it. They have all their (oft debunked) numbers to prove that nobody uses Linux and that somehow proves their case that Linux really isn't all that secure after all. The completely ignore the fact that servers, especially big iron, are much juicier targets than home PCs both because they are more powerful and because taking the right ones down would be truly disruptive. |
| number6x May 20, 2009 5:24 PM EDT |
Doesn't Linux have about a 26% marketshare in the server market, # 2 to Windows 36% or so.
Windows and Linux market share are the same order of magnitude. Doesn't Apache have the #1 spot in webserving market share? Double IIS's market share. Yet IIS has many more vulnerabilities. Most people fail to realize how big FOSS is. FOSS resources dwarf any single proprietary companies resources. Remember Itanium? One of the big reasons it flopped was that Microsoft could not get out of Beta with their Itanium port of Windows. Intel customers wanted Windows (at that time). Microsoft did not have the resources to get the job done and deliver the product. Linux was ported to Itanium before the first Itanium chips rolled off the assembly line! However, at the time, corporations thought of Linux as the 'cheap OS' you used for file servers on old cast off equipment. Yes national laboratories and research institutions were using Linux in super computing, but corporations don't hang with that crowd. The tech press told them Linux was for Geeks in basements and for cheap print servers on already depreciated cast off equipment. End of story. How many of the new billionaires have based their tech start ups on Windows? Google? Amazon? YouTube? Granted that Linux and FOSS has vulnerabilities, but they are fewer and the fixes come faster. Security (natch) Savings (Uh, Free?) Speed (no drm, no anti - virus, no anti - spyware) Simplicity (just read a EULA) Linux and FOSS give you all of these |
| caitlyn May 20, 2009 6:08 PM EDT |
Itanium isn't quite the flop you'd imagine. Instead of ending up in cheap commodity servers and desktops it ended up in HP servers higher up the food chain. HP still uses Itanium chips AFAIK. |
| tuxchick May 20, 2009 6:35 PM EDT |
Linux is given the credit for saving Itanium, since both SUSE and Red Hat had enterprise-worthy 64-bit releases long before Windoze. |
| Sander_Marechal May 20, 2009 6:56 PM EDT |
The Itanic not a flop? Projected revenue was nearly 40 billion a year. They achieved less than 10% of that about 5 years later than planned. IDC says about 184.000 Itanium systems sold. That's total, not per year. Against what? 8-10 million x86 servers per year? I'd call that quite a big flop for an architecture that was supposed to grab majority market share in pretty much everything but the home desktop market. |
| tracyanne May 20, 2009 11:54 PM EDT |
Quoting:Low added that OSS may not necessarily be more secure compared to closed source choices, because of ownership. The vendor selling proprietary software is directly responsible for product quality and hence has a vested interest in ensuring timely product fixes, he said. Which begs the question, "So how come their fixes are neither timely and, often, not effective?" |
| dinotrac May 21, 2009 1:56 PM EDT |
ta - Because their warranties disclaim the living hell out of liability. I once took a contracts class from the guy who wrote the Lotus 1-2-3 license. He told us that it was written in a way that completely let Lotus off the hook for miscalculations, essentially requiring users to manually verify calculations. |
| hkwint May 21, 2009 3:09 PM EDT |
Quoting:He told us that it was written in a way that completely let Lotus off the hook for miscalculations, essentially requiring users to manually verify calculations. Believe it or not, but even engineers do this. For example in 'piping designs' for industrial plants you would find the notices that lengths have to be checked. Meaning even if all the dimensions on the drawing are wrong and the pipes don't fit or end up ending in the middle of the desert, still nobody could blame the drawer. That's why I'm still looking for such a job - however if I wanted to blame others for my mistakes I'd better become a <TOS violation goes here>, don't you think? |
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