Serious flaws in Wipro study

Story: Windows beats Linux on security - Wipro SurveyTotal Replies: 1
Author Content
hkwint

Jun 24, 2005
11:57 AM EDT
To quickly point out six flaws in this study:

1) Previous research shows most of the companies don't have any idea of TCO-difference between Linux and Windows, so how would they now cost-differences when it comes to patching?

2) quote] Independence Air... with Linux they had to rely on consultants to tell them if their system was secure or not, while in the case of Windows, they could depend on Microsoft to inform them and provide the necessary updates. [/quote] Right. They just have incompetent Linux administrators if they need a consultant for Linux, and they shouldn't trust MS when security is an issue. These people are really stupid, or paid by MS.

3)
Quoting: Survey respondents consistently overestimated the number of Windows vulnerabilities, while underestimating those for OSS.
I think they underestimate the vulnerabilities of Windows as well, because of the biased vulnerability-rating MS uses.

4) Next remark, let's say you run a Gentoo system (I know Gentoo, but the same is true for almost every other distro as well), with Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP for example, and compare it to some Windows server which needs some 3d party software as well, but doing the same, and you're going to update; Using some Linux distro, you could update all 3d party software without any more effort than updating your base-components. (something like Emerge -pu world) When using Windows, you'd have to check all 3d party software seperately, and update it seperately, using different procedures.

5) I read 'MS; Monthly rollout of updates'. So when it's the 7th day of the month and there's a critical bug, you'd have to wait 21 days?

6) MS milestone releases (for example Windows 2000 ==> XP, XP_SP1==> SP_2) make it more difficult to update than some more gliding scale.

Concluding, I don't take this study too seriously, but still I'm afraid others will.
chris

Jun 25, 2005
6:31 AM EDT
It was commissioned by Microsoft, so it has to be true.

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