Lower Development Costs (Maintain- (Maintain-ability)

It is much less expensive for hardware vendors to support Linux.

If you want to build a device driver, a great place to start is by look-ing at existlook-ing shipplook-ing device drivers, an opportunity that Linux offers to everyone. A proprietary “Device Driver Toolkit” with its sample code is never as good as production code. Those expensive kits contain documentation, but not source code — so you some-times have to guess at what is happening down below.

We find in Windows today that hardware manufacturers have duplicated a bunch of the functionality Windows provides but does-n't quite fit their needs. For example, IBM includes its own applet and status icon for wireless Internet, so Windows XP on IBM

hard-6 Some components contain multiple versions to allow for a transition period.

ware has two. Presumably they weren't satisfied with the features Windows provided, and weren't able to fix them. And so they had to build new applets from scratch! This is also what gives Windows a feeling of a jumble of components slapped together.

Here are five of the 100 applets IBM adds to Windows:

Windows XP with 5 of IBM's 100 extra applets. Notice the large number of status icons on this almost-virgin installation.

Building all of these applets, designing multilingual user inter-faces, providing the means to install and configure, etc. is ten times more work than merely writing the device driver, leveraging other shipping drivers, and uploading it to the official codebase.

The reason my Photodesk printer driver didn't work on Windows Server 2003 was because of a crash in the installation code — which HP shouldn't even be bothering with in the first place.

5. Security (Reliability and Maintain-ability)

To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.

—Scott Granneman

Attempting to compare the security of operating systems is a complicated endeavor because there are an infinite number of risks.

It is like asking whether one car is safer than another. Against what:

Getting hit from the front? Rolling over? Having the gas tank pierced? Its ability to brake?

Furthermore, neither Windows nor Linux are perfectly secure operating systems; both are prone to buffer-overrun viruses, an issue I will discuss in the tools chapter. Furthermore, new threats appear over time, and so each nefarious advancement requires new logic to defend against it. Given these caveats, it is still possible to make some comparisons.

Some of the previous advantages of Linux, such as its simplicity, modularity, support for SELinux, etc. all help with its security. In addition, the nature of how Linux is developed also helps. A docu-ment commissioned by the US Military said:

Open source software is potentially subject to scrutiny by many eyes

Therefore bugs, security flaws, and poor design cannot hide for long, at least when the software has a community of program-mers to support it. And since fixing the code doesn't depend on a single vendor, patches are often distributed much more rapidly than patches to closed source software.

Can increase code quality and security

With closed source software, it's often difficult to evaluate the quality and security of the code. In addition, closed source soft-ware companies have an incentive to delay announcing security flaws or bugs in their product. Often this means that their cus-tomers don't learn of security flaws until weeks or months after the security exploit was known internally.

—Open Technology Development Roadmap

Another big difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux was adapted from Unix, which had a multiuser design right from the beginning. In Windows, users have historically had full Administra-tor access to the machine, including the ability to overwrite system files. When the computer is attacked by a virus, the virus can gain the same capabilities as the user and thereby hide itself inside

sys-tem files, which make it very difficult to remove. On Linux, I can write only to my own files and have read-only access to all others.

Linux's multiuser nature, and therefore its focus on minimal permis-sions, minimizes any damage.

One study found that there are about 60,000 known viruses for Windows, and only about 40 for Linux. Another study by Evans Data showed that 8% of Linux developers say their machines have been infected by malicious code, compared to 60% of Windows machines.

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post found that code to exploit flaws in Internet Explorer 6 existed for 284 days in 2006, while Fire-fox was at risk for just 9. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier recommended in December 2004 that people not run Internet Explorer. Some argue that Linux and Firefox have fewer viruses because they have fewer users, but Apache is well-respected for its security.

For most of my tenure at Microsoft, we worried about features, reliability, and performance, not security. Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, said in 2002:

Many of the products we designed in the past have been less secure than they could have been because we were designing with features in mind rather than security.

Microsoft has greatly increased its focus on security in the past few years, and I am sure the security of every product improves with every release, but the baggage of their codebases serve as an ongo-ing impediment.

Having browsed through the sources to a number of Linux appli-cations, one can say the free codebases are typically cleaner than their Windows counterparts, which makes them easier to secure.

The default server-oriented Debian 4.0 Linux distribution requires a mere 170MB of disk space, whereas Windows Server 2003 requires 3 GB. All other things being equal, the fact that Debian is 17 times smaller means it will be more secure. The free database MySQL is a mere 26MB download; the code is clean and small, and therefore much more likely to be reliable and secure.

Another advantage of Linux is that all the applications in a Linux operating system receive security updates. In the Microsoft world, only Microsoft's code is protected by Windows Update.

While Linux is free to acquire, it can also be cheaper to run and maintain than Windows because of its better security. The city of Manchester in England spent $2 million in 2009 to remove the Con-ficker worm from their computers.