As for the anecdotal evidence, I don't need to provide any. Microsoft does that at a rate of... 4-12 a week? "Security patch fixes vulnerability"
As for the compiling from tarballs, yes, the locations of the libraries changing makes for a pain in the but, but thats why you have the configure scripts which are *supposed* to check for the locations of the required libraries, store it in a variable, and pipe it into the automake. If that fails, there is always ln -s
.
The evidence is in the quantity and types of patches. To provide more evidence would require doing things that arent nice and posting those things on the net for review. But, since those things arent nice, cant help ya on that one. When you look at the number of actual "security" patches that comes from linux, they occur rarely.
Now the last statement you made is a good point. What are the characteristics of a good operating system really? Does microsoft have those characteristics? Does linux have them? Which operating systems fall into it. We could start a whole new thread on that alone. I might do that
.
In the end, I think it will come down to application selection, stability, ease of use, and cost. Microsoft definately has 2 of those, but what about the stability (yes, it is very true that its gotten much more stable since it went over to the NT kernel), but cost? give me a break. We are paying for software from the 80s (even with vista.).
The link dexter posted contains more information than most people know. I had already known about it before a friend of mine told me about that site from spending 8 years researching the company. What you learn from it is quite interesting, provided you read through it all.
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html
To the link you posted. Ill be going there shortly to see what this evidence of theirs is.
Ahhhhh, that method. I don't even have to really explain it. The link you posted even explains a large reason for the differences.
#1. Microsoft is closed source, so people dont get to go "oh hey, we found a bug". Microsoft tries to keep everything secret, and *if its big and discovered* they fix it.
#2. If you look at the list, most of the "linux unix" Is from *all* of the major distro sets packed into one. Those lists are formulated by gathering information from the freely available "Bugzilla"s and the like, that are present for the open source developers to find those bugs, fix them, and get them turned around. You will NEVER see microsoft doing this, because they know it would raise their number to hell.
Here is an example:
[FONT=arial,geneva,helvetica]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)
PCRE Regular Expression Heap Overflow (Updated)[/FONT][/FONT]
ok so we are looking at the perl regulal expressions heap overflow numerous times? No. 1 time for each Distro it gathers info from the bug database. With microsoft, the "microsoft kb" is not even close to up to date with all of their bugs.