Buggy Linux, Buggy Windows

Going through emails for the past week, I found an inter­est­ing arti­cle about how buggy Linux and Win­dows are. It’s a good counter argu­ment to my own col­umn on the move from Win­dows to Linux.

One thing I would ques­tion, how­ever, is the via­bil­ity of the study. The prob­lem comes from some of the basic assess­ment. First is the prob­lem of assum­ing that Microsoft and Red Hat are on par in terms of devel­op­ment team sizes. This is sim­ply a fal­lacy, no mat­ter in which OS camp you sit.

The sec­ond is in look­ing at the bug lists and what was included and excluded. What would be nice is actu­ally see­ing the rank of bugs. Microsoft seems to rank most of its bugs as crit­i­cal. Red Hat patches every­thing, from bugs in Linux to bugs in appli­ca­tions run­ning on top of Linux. The Red­hat errata page for 7.3 lists fixes to MySQL, Python, Lynx, OpenSSL, etc… In order for a true side by side com­par­i­son, one would need to add IIS, Inter­net Explorer, Microsoft SQL server, etc… to the list of bugs listed in the Microsoft errata. When doing that side by side com­par­i­son, it still seems that Microsoft holds the lead­ing posi­tion in buggy software.