School Essay

[Fred]

Does anyone know where I can get factual information online concerning Windows and Linux? (Specifically instablity/stablity issues, which is better and why). This has to actually be from a company if you know what I mean. It can't be some guy on a forums going "I love windows, it is stable" or visa versa. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Anti-Trend]

Does anyone know where I can get factual information online concerning Windows and Linux? (Specifically instablity/stablity issues, which is better and why). This has to actually be from a company if you know what I mean. It can't be some guy on a forums going "I love windows, it is stable" or visa versa. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The reason there is no black and white comparison info between the two platforms is that the methods for comparison are subjective. For instance, Microsoft itself can't even seem to pin down whether it's better to have more security patches or less. When they release more patches, more is better. When they release less patches, less is better. See a pattern?

If you want clear cut, factual info which cannot be misconstrued in any way, I think Windows and Linux proponents alike can agree that Stanford's study into the matter is probably as close as one can get. The argument goes something like this:

"Since 1999, the source code of the Linux operating system has been subject to analysis by a team of researchers at Stanford University. The project is now being run by a company that was set up by these researchers called Coverity - http://www.coverity.com/.

The latest Linux 2.6 kernel contains 5.7 million lines of code in which only 985 bugs were identified - far below the average incidences of bugs found or estimated to be in other commercial enterprise software.

Windows XP Home edition has 40 million lines of code, but no one yet has tried to establish or estimate how many bugs per thousand lines of code it contains. However, given the rate at which Microsoft has to issue patches and security updates for all of its software, Windows XP must have at least and probably much more than the 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code that commercial software is estimated to have.

And, because Linux is open-source software, for which the source code is available to any software developer, most of the identified bugs discovered in it have either been fixed, or in the act of being fixed by someone.

Because Microsoft keeps its source code secret, only it can correct the bugs and security holes in its software. Therefore, there is a much longer period between identifying and fixing them than there is in Linux, which has far fewer bugs or security holes to identify in the first place."

Stanford has also released a paper on the topic, entitled "Society and Open Source", by Ben Pfaff and Ken David, Ph.D., M.B.A. ...since the phrase "oss-is-better" makes up the title of this particular piece of HTML, you can easily surmise the outcome of this study.

-AT