OT: Linux most breached OS

[John Esak]

s.  I'd say 80% of the time or better, everyone else has
> their bugs acknowledged and patches out the door--and MS has yet to even
> verify that their bugs exist.  Bill, you read those alerts--am I wrong
> about this trend?

Mark, I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong. I have been getting
updates on all of our 2000 and XP systems for the past couple years now.
They come in daily, weekly, monthly... whenever they are needed. These are
security patches, o/s fixes, etc. Microsoft is far and away ahead of any
other company or o/s in keeping its systems up to date... and making it easy
for millions of people to avail themselves of these fixes/patches in a
variety of automated/manual ways. You are just dead wrong.

Incidentally, it is a matter of usability and convenience. JP mentioned the
other day that he uses HylaFax because we were talking about VSI*FAX and a
small thing in one of their scripts that I wanted to change. I asked him if
HF had a package that could just be installed from a disk or a download file
and immediately administered by any user/administrator.  His response was
interesting. He said, no, that was not the nature of free software.  Hmmm.
Very telling. When and if Linux(et al) has to supply an o/s that is
administratable (is that a word?) by non-guru-programmer types... then we
can compare apples to apples. For now and until then Linux and its offering
will not be in the same ball game with Microsoft who is playing on a much
larger field. I suppose the next big shot will be the Novell release of
SuSe. More power to it. I hope it does a better job than *all* the other
Linux's thus far.

As for Free BSD... I like it and I like Verio's implementation of it as a
virtual machine for me.  It has a really good on-line management tool for
normal things... and a really good set of tools  for the shell administrator
for installing anything from Spam Assassin to Python to just about anything.
The BSD is kept up to date and I'm assuming as safe as possible....
something I am truly appreciative for... I don't want to be doing make's and
configuring and updates... I have better things to do for the company using
the O/S than just supporting the O/S. At least that is a businessman's point
of view.  And still, I ask the one and only unanswerable question.  What
business could possibly run a Linux server/system *without* paying a
programmer/administrator to constantly keep it together and updated?

I knew this topic would be kindling... and so I am very happy you are
keeping your arguments in the cool zone. :-)  I mean, after all as OT as
this topic is, this is a filePro forum and that should not pre-possess this
place to being solely *nix or MS based. There are users of all types coming
here... I would venture to say a good 70% of them know nothing about Linux
or SCO and could care less. MS exists and has its place. Its sort of like
Israel... :-)   (Oh jeez, what have I said now.  :-) :-) :-) :-)  )

JE

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