Will Security Be the Microsoft vs Linux Battleground for 2006?
“If you look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, the average patch time is under a day. With the recent critical WMF (Windows Meta File) vulnerability, it took Microsoft seven days.” This, claims a consulting software engineer for Red Hat, is the key to interpreting correctly the raw data published last week by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). Linux repairs itself faster, in that case seven times faster, than Windows. So is security, rather than TCO, is set to become the new battleground – the 2006 battleground – for the ongoing tussle between Windows and Linux for the hearts and minds of today’s IT managers and sysadmins? It seems inevitable. The RH software engineer, Mark Cox, also told a reporter that the US-CERT study was “confusing and misleading” because for example Firefox is caregorized under Unix/Linux and so its various flaws and vulnerabilities in 2005 are listed there, whereas of course FF runs under Windows too, as do Apache and PHP, two other erro
