Linux vendors hit back at Ballmer's email

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Oct 2004 15:54 BST

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Training
In the section of the email on TCO, Ballmer also raised issues of the cost and availability of trained Linux resources to support Linux deployments, citing a Forrester Report, from early 2004, entitled The Costs and Risks of Open Source.

The Microsoft chief executive claimed Forrester found that training for IT employees was 15 percent more expensive for Linux than for Windows due to a lack of internal knowledge and a lack of availability of training materials.

But according to Novell's Hogan, the Forrester report also states that the added training costs for Linux are transitory and will reduce as companies gain more experience with the OS.

Security
The Ballmer memo also quotes data from a Forrester study entitled Is Linux More Secure than Windows?. It states that according to the analysts' study the four major Linux distributions have a higher incidence and severity of vulnerabilities, and are slower than Microsoft to provide security updates.

Representatives from Red Hat, Novell and Mandrakesoft claim the Forrester report was flawed.

Earlier this summer, Mark Cox from Red Hat's security response team told ZDNet UK that his firm had worked closely with Forrester, and that these findings were flawed because the analyst group had just taken a simple average of the data.

"An average is not representative. Red Hat fixes issues which other operating systems wouldn't fix, such as temporary file vulnerabilities," said Cox, adding that the report also failed to take into account the severity of the issues.

"A vulnerability which could allow a remote attack on Windows was considered in the same light as a file vulnerability on Linux which makes the system slow down," said Cox.

Novell's Hogan agrees with Cox that the report fails to take into account severity. "Mr Ballmer failed to mention that the study found Microsoft had the highest number of critical flaws," he says.

Hogan also says that the study measured the time to fix a flaw from the time it is made public, which is different for Microsoft and open source. "In open source, this is immediate, so a fix can be generated quickly. Microsoft delays making the existence of a flaw known as long as possible, unless your company has signed a special non-disclosure agreement with them," he says.

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