Re: gEDA-user: which linux?

[Stephen Meier <smeier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

hoyuka hoya wrote:

> Hello,
>
>
>  
<snip>

> It's sad, but now MS is better for many purposes. Ok there are many
> security holes and viruses, but if Linux were as popular as WinXP, Linux
> would also suffer from similar things.
>
>  

Here I am going to disagree for a couple of reasons.

1) Microsoft makes it money buy selling new features. this meens MS puts 
a priority on adding new and often complex features not on chassing down 
every last security breach possibility. With open source in general and 
linux in particular the priorities are reliability and performance. The 
unix security model of supper users and users has been around since the 
early 70's. MS windows has often made it difficult to run important 
applications (quick books for example) as a user forcing the user to 
have full administrator privlidges. Unix/linux discourage users from 
running as a super user for the vast majority of tasks. Therefor the 
damage a user can do is much reduced even if the run a trogan horse 
application 

2) MS has also tried to make their os as backwards compatable as 
possible over the years. Often this ment intentionally re-iplementing 
bugs that developers had written work arounds for. This is important for 
users who have considerable investments in proprietary applications. Can 
you imagine finding out that your thousands of dollars of software 
doesn't run on your new os.

See the article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/18/355177.aspx

Open Source, gets around this issue in two ways. First, the source code 
for open source applications can be recompiled and fixed to match the 
os. Second, the proprietary applications can be run in emulators such as 
wine and the dos emulator.

So thanks, I disagree that if linux captures a significant share of the 
marketplace that it will be as unsecure as windows.


Steve Meier


<snip>

> Regards,
> hoyuka
>
>