Red Hat Flaws

OK, so the headline doesn’t sound so great, but read on…

Secunia: More Red Hat flaws than Microsoft in 2007 - ZDNet UK

Secunia said that while Red Hat had more reported vulnerabilities than Windows, it was not possible to compare its relative security with Microsoft products, or comment on the relative security of open-source versus proprietary products based on vulnerability figures.

“It’s impossible to make a fair comparison — it’s like comparing apples to oranges,” Thomas Kristensen, Secunia’s chief technology officer, told ZDNet.co.uk. “Red Hat has the highest number of applications included, so the number of vulnerabilities that affect it is bound to be higher.”

(snip)

Kristensen said that third-party software was a key factor affecting the number of vulnerabilities attributed to the respective operating systems. With Red Hat, 99 percent, or 629 of the vulnerabilities, were due to third-party components. With Windows, four percent of flaws were due to third-party software.

One of the differences between the operating systems, said Kristensen, was that Red Hat notified customers of third-party flaws that affected its operating systems, as well as supporting them. Microsoft, on the other hand, only notified customers of flaws within its control.

Some experts are bound to ask why we feature news like this on this blog. Why go there?

It’s simple: When people debate Red Hat vulnerabilities vs. those found in our competitors, we win.

The open source model isn’t problem free, it just deals with problems much more openly and efficiently.

And Red Hat is understandably proud of that.

This entry was posted by T. Colin Dodd on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 9:01 am and is filed under Truth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.