Now that you're wondering what a headline like that is doing on a Microsoft site, let me explain.  I joined Microsoft in Nov 2004 after working for both a large Database vendor and an Enterprise Linux vendor.  Now that I have been here for a couple of months I feel it is time I weighed in on this question.  These headlines, or similar ones, tend to pop up every now and then and seem to point out that on the whole, Linux has fewer bugs than Windows.  Now I'm not going to argue that point, I'll leave that to you to comment on; however, what I do want to point out is that in my opinion, most of these stories only tell half the story.  I think what gets missed in a lot of these discussions is the scope of what is being compared or analyzed.  In one of the more recent articles, the author points out research that shows a relatively low number of bugs for "Linux" versus a potentially larger number for Windows.  This is where things start to get interesting, in most cases, what actually gets looked at when people discuss "Linux" is the Linux kernel, whether it is 2.4 or 2.6 really doesn't matter.  However, what does matter is that in most cases the analysis stops at the kernel, it does not go on to look at many of the other components that go into making up a distribution of Linux.  That is the important point, how many of you only deploy the kernel? and if so, what can you actually run on just the kernel?  All Linux users are really using a distribution of Linux, which happens to include a specific version of the kernel as the core. 

 

The reason this distinction is important is that when people look at Windows they are looking at a complete OS, similar to any Linux distribution.  When you start to include things like Sendmail, Bind, Apache, NFS, CUPS, a GUI, etc. in a Linux distribution, you start to notice that there are regular updates to these packages to fix bugs, security issues, or vulnerabilities.  The point I'm trying to make here, is that if you were able to look at just the windows kernel I think that the perception of windows may be significantly different, but since the GUI and the kernel are not made available separately, the perception continues.

 

Let’s try to keep this in mind next time one of these reports comes out.