You get that impression sometimes… They may just be a vocal minority, but it’s always the same clueless rhetoric… Today I read this blog:

http://www.itworld.com/security/75601/why-windows-security-awful

It just makes me feel like all these linux people just started running linux because it’s the ‘cool’ thing to do these days. They haven’t actually used linux in the early days, let alone any actual unix predecessors. How else could you talk the nonsense that this guy is talking in his blog?

I’m talking mainly about this passage here:

“Again, it all comes down to all of Windows security improvements amounting to being just layer over another of security over its fatal single-user, non-networked genetics.

That’s why Linux and Mac OS X, which is based on BSD Unix at its heart, are fundamentally safer. Their design forefathers were multi-user, networked systems. From their very beginning, they were built to deal with a potentially hostile world. Windows wasn’t. It’s really that simple.”

“Fundamentally safer”? “Built to deal with a potentially hostile world”? Oh please… The unix world was just as naive about security as the Windows world, and as a result, they learnt the hard way (and I don’t even want to get into the incredible display of ignorance with his “single-user, non-networked genetics”. I suppose he just doesn’t know what Windows NT is all about). Now, this may come as a shock, linux people, but I’m actually going to post some FACTS to prove you wrong.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall:

“Firewall technology emerged in the late 1980s when the Internet was a fairly new technology in terms of its global use and connectivity.”

“The first paper published on firewall technology was in 1988, when engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) developed filter systems known as packet filter firewalls. This fairly basic system was the first generation of what would become a highly evolved and technical internet security feature.”

Now, in case you didn’t quite manage to put 2 + 2 together yourself, let me point out the obvious: Unix was originally developed in 1969, with the original networking technology that eventually led to the internet developed not much later.

Okay, so it took them about 19 years to come up with the concept of a firewall/packet filter, which is now one of the most basic measures of network security… In fact, the firewall actually BREAKS many rules of the official Internet Protocol in order to improve security. In other words, the Internet Protocol has some security problems *by design*.

That’s not all, however… When I started using unix systems in the mid-90s at university, they were pretty much still wide open. Lots of daemons running by default, wide open to the world, including nasty ones like fingerd, talkd and telnetd (not just linux, but also commercial variations like HP-UX). A standard linux distribution or FreeBSD would also install with pretty much all common daemons running by default. Wide open. Even the rpc daemon was running… all security holes waiting to happen. In fact, Windows systems were arguably more secure back in those days, because networking didn’t come standard, let alone network daemons/services.

I guess today’s linux advocates aren’t quite familiar with this history of linux, or unix in general. Doesn’t matter, their target audience likely won’t know anything about it either, and just accept their uninformed babble. It just makes them look like idiots to people who DO know how things really evolved. It’s bad enough that they don’t have a clue about Windows, their favourite target… but when they don’t even know about linux or unix itself, it gets pathetic.

Luckily, I also spotted this article:

http://www.itworld.com/open-source/77409/why-users-dumped-your-open-source-app-proprietary-software

Now that’s refreshing… I’ve been saying it as well, bashing your competitors will only get you so far. You should also be looking at what it is that makes them successful, and try to beat them at their own game. Many opensource advocates seem to think that it’s a given that people would prefer free/open software to proprietary/commercial solutions. They think that if you use something else, you must be an idiot. But obviously that’s not the case. People are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, and price or freedom aren’t the only criteria. It’s good to see people from within the community saying it as well, because they will never accept it from ‘outsiders’.

To conclude, a nice blog of someone who also discovered the idiocy of linux users:

http://www.commandlineidiot.com/blog/2007/linux-users-are-all-crazy-fundamentalists/