Surprise, surprise!

[Peter Hummers]

On Nov 9, 2004, at 9:59 AM, RacerX wrote:

> Surprise.
>
> According to a study the British security firm mi2g, Linux is the 
> world's "most breached" OS and is exploited more frequently than 
> Windows. The company recently analyzed more than 235,000 successful 
> attacks against computers that were permanently connected to the 
> Internet during the past year and concluded that Linux was responsible 
> for most of the successful exploits.

I think this has to do with the efforts to mold Linux into a marketable 
desktop system for civilians (a la RedHat, although I like that company 
and have nothing against them).

Which brings to my mind BSD evangelism. Is it necessary for the 
survival of the BSDs that they go on my grandmother's desktop? People 
who need BSD professionally (as opposed to dilletantes like me) know 
about it. And we dilletantes find out. A professional sysadmin should 
know that BSD is better than Linux (for serving etc., I mean). Are the 
free BSDs in danger?

I hate to reference it yet again, but maybe the BSD license is a reason 
a BSD-based OS - Mac OS X - is called the most-used Un*x, though that 
characterization seems dubious to me.

Not that there's anything wrong with Linux! Maybe its proper spot _is_ 
the desktop. The nature of the Linux exploits interests me - do they 
involve things like people's credit card numbers, or just the theft of 
some Grateful Dead mp3s from RMS' laptop? ;-)>