Linux receives pat on the back for security

Apr 18, 2005: A recent survey carried out by Evans Data has revealed that development managers have more faith in Linux as an operating system to guard them against internal attacks than they have in Windows.

Over 6,000 development managers were interviewed in the Evans Data Corporation's new Spring 2005 Linux and Development survey. They considered open source software to be more secure with client operating systems; web servers; server operating systems and components and libraries.

This perception has also been recently validated in the city of Munich, which said last week that it will migrate 14,000 of its computers from Microsoft's Windows operating system to Linux.

It is believed that big enterprises and governments are choosing to switch to Linux now because of its reputation for security and because it is not owned by just one company.

In addition, the survey has revealed that Linux developers now prefer non-commercial versions of Linux. Six months ago, 25 percent of Linux developers did not believe there were any advantages to a commercial version over a non-commercial version, but there has been a 50 percent increase in the last six months.

John F. Andrews, the COO of Evans Data, said: "The sharp drop off of belief in 'support' being the biggest advantage is another strong indicator of the quality of non-commercial offerings.

"Considering that 85 percent of Linux developers feel the biggest advantage of non-commercial Linux is the ease and cost of upgrades and maintenance, it can be taken as another sign of the maturity of the non-commercial distributions of Linux."

However, one good think for proprietary software, such as Windows, is that it was considered to be more secure than Linux in database servers, according to the survey.

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