Ask OSDL CEO Stu Cohen About Linux TCO Studies

This morning OSDL and OSDL member Levanta jointly released a study done by Enterprise Management Associates called Get the Truth on Linux Management. For years, a proprietary software company in Washington State has run what they call a Get the Facts campaign about Linux, full of studies that invariably show Linux to be expensive, hard to maintain, and less than totally secure. Stu Cohen, as CEO of OSDL, a group "dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise," will happily answer your questions about Linux vs. Windows studies and the myths and FUD that seem to hover over them. Expect Stu's answers to the 10 - 12 highest-moderated questions later this week.

Which is better? It all depends!

[Opportunist]

Especially not in a heated market like the OS biz. Who can tell what's "better" or "worse"? To what scale do you measure? And even if you find a way to compare them, what tells you that we won't see the same phenomenon that benchmarks sparked in the CPU and Graphics sector, companies that trim their products to perform perfectly in the artificial test environment (and really suck sometimes in everyday appliances)?

Do I need graphics on a server OS? Do I need highly sophisticated user permissions on a single user machine? Do I need support for 10 billion hardware pieces? Do I need flying pages when copying? Is it important that you can trim the system to run even on a P90? Do I want to be able to use the most recent fads in anti-aliasing and pixel shading? Do I need to be compatible with 100 other formats across 20 OSs? Do I need or want to customize my kernel? Does it make sense to cram the GUI into the system (and the internet browser as well)? Is it useful to ram the Mailreader into the system so tightly that it's virtually impossible to get rid of it?

No offense, but who are you to answer those questions for me?

So which system is "better"? Neither. Or both. Or it's really one of them. It just depends on who you are, how much you know (or want to know), how flexible you would like to be, and most of all, what you want to do with your machine.

web browser in OS security

[EightBits]

Part of the problem here is that when comparing a Linux OS to Windows, you have to recognize the fact that Windows comes bundled with a browser. It is part of the OS and you know that few users want a computer that cannot browse the web. So, to be fair, you have to compare competing OSes on like terms and this means including a web browser with linux-based operating systems.

Most distributions include Firefox in their installation. Yes, it's true, Firefox is not linux. But then if you start going down that path, we'll start to see people going to the extreme of saying, KDE is not Linux, glibc is not linux, linux is a kernel, etc... We have to draw the line somewhere. So, we include browsers in the comparisons. But, we can't include browsers like Konqueror because not everyone uses KDE. We have to use a browser that the majority of users actually use. On Windows, this is IE. On linux-based OSes, this is mozilla/firefox. It just needs to be stated as a caveat that Firefox security holes exist on both platforms as with any application that runs on both.