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(Note and disclaimer: I am not a security pro. I am a system administrator, and hold an RHCE. I also have a college degree, although I took a good long time to finish it up.)

The CISSP is pretty much considered the gold standard of security generalist certifications. CISSPs rarely hurt for jobs for long.

If you're interested in something Linux related, you may want to look at Red Hat's Certified Security Specialist program. To get it, you need to complete the RHCE first (which looks good on a resume in and of itself), followed by an additional three exams covering network security, distributed authentication, and SELinux. Each exam is offered by itself, or on day five following a 4-day intensive course. Not exactly for the faint of heart, though, so if you're focusing on network level security without a lot of system administration, you'll probably want to give it a miss.

My company of tens of thousands employees uses Red Hat company wide. They find the free cost to be quite lucrative--just buying support whenever it's needed.


Pop Quiz: If your company has 10,000 desktops for its employees - how many support licenses do you think they need to acquire from RedHat to qualify for support? My bet: 10,000. Your "whenever needed" makes it sound as if it's not the case - can you confirm?

RH Subscription license (http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us.html?count ry=buying+a+Red+Hat+Subscription+from+Red+Hat) says:
5.1 Reporting. Client will promptly notify Red Hat if the number of Installed Systems exceeds the number of Installed Systems for which Client has paid the applicable fee. In its notice, Client will include both the number of additional Installed Systems and the date(s) on which such Installed Systems were put into use. Red Hat will invoice Client for the applicable Services for such Installed Systems on a pro-rata basis and Client will pay for such Services in accordance with this Agreement.

You toss out a lot of prices in your post, but you don't really indicate what the price is for.

One example you use is a comparison of RedHat Workstation for $299 versus Windows XP Professional for $140. That RedHat Workstation you're buying comes with a fairly nice support contract... According to the website you get unlimited incidents and a 4 hour response time. That Windows price is just the license to use their software, no implied support contract at all...and Microsoft charges $245 per incident if you don't have a support contract...

A more accurate comparison of prices might be Fedora Core for $0 (just the license to use the software, no implied support contract) versus $140 for Windows XP Professional. Or Redhat Workstation for $299 (with unlimited support) versus $8,299 for "up to 10 hours of proactive support assistance" from Microsoft.

Software is cheap, support is expensive - and with OSS products you are generally buying support, since the software is usually available for free.

How much support do you get from Red Hat for your $299?

How much from Microsoft for your $140?

For years, most operating systems have been designed for 2-4 processors, with some handling more, and others doing better with less (I'm sorry, FreeBSD fans, I use it myself, but let's be honest, SMP was horrible until 5-REL, and it still isn't up there with Linux and *ugh* Microsoft).

With 4 core out this year, and 80 cores out in 5 years, it's time to rethink multiprocessor operating systems. There needs to be a significant change in the locking and threading metaphors, because 4 and 8 way will be obsolete by this time next year.

It sounds good, but it's not like Microsoft is going to suffer a lot for this.

Thus far, the most startling difference has been that people here appear to try to sell open source software, rather than making it available for free.

Are you really that surprised?

https://www.redhat.com/apps/commerce/
https://shop.mysql.com/
http://www.novell.com/linux/
http://www.cafepress.com/officialgentoo/1227454

etc...

And if you prefer the free approach:

ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/

>The only way to have a 100% secure web browser is to use a text browser with no scripts

http://old.zone-h.org/advisories/read/id=8276
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2003-029.html

I'd suggest telnet to port 80, typing in GET commands, and reading the HTML. But then someone would embed the nam-shub of Enki and you'd be even worse off.

How about getting X to release pixmaps properly? See http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/performance /epiphany/ for details.

"the DoD *really* doesn't like that they don't know who wrote the software, and they also don't like the lack of a central point of contact"

To find out who wrote the software, just read the license agreement ..

Novell Software License Agreement
Red Hat Agreements
Cleversafe Commercial License
Digium End-User License Agreement

"CCEVS evaluation is really REALLY expensive and takes frickin' forever. Now, this is no barrier to Microsoft, which has had enough money and time to get Windows .. evaluated"

"Open source products tend to come with a list of disclaimers as long as your arm"

"Microsoft warrants that the Software will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying materials for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of receipt" - XP EUAL

Microsoft .. provide the Software .. AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS, and hereby disclaim all other warranties .. of reliability .. of lack of viruses .. ALSO, THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NON-INFRINGEMENT WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE - XP EUAL

was Re:What the DoD objects to

I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS at home for the last few years (Well, since Breezy, so thats just over a year)... The only thing I find "missing" from Windows, is my music software, games, and a shitty app that I have to use for my mp3 player. Small things for me really, and I'm happy to wait for alternatives to come out for Linux.

As for using Ubuntu/Linux in a corporate environment, I have been doing so for the last 12 months or so. There is one thing that I need to keep a Windows box for: MS Outlook. The Evolution-Exchange plugin is poor, and for reasons I wont bore you with, IMAP is not sufficient. Other than Outlook, I'm free of Windows.

If you are working with Linux/UNIX servers day-to-day, I can honestly say using Linux on your workstation is much better - Need to ssh to someserver? You don't need to download PuTTY. Need to scp a file across? directly connect to the server from your Gnome Applications menu (No need to download WinSCP). Need to display a window remotely via X? Just ssh -XC in, no need to download cygwin etc. etc. etc.

On the server side - Exchange is used here, although OpenExchange is (apparently) easily interchangable. The majority of our servers are Linux, and it seems viable to use RedHat Directory Server if you have Windows workstations.

I will concede that Linux is still up there in the power-users arena, rather than for normal users. But, in a corporate environment built soley on Linux, it's most definitely ready.

Dtrace is CDDL so it probably can not be ported to Linux. But systemtap is a good alternative and pretty far along. http://sources.redhat.com/systemtap/wiki/Systemtap DtraceComparison

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

Overview

SystemTap provides free software (GPL) infrastructure to simplify the gathering of information about the running Linux kernel. This assists diagnosis of a performance or functional problem. SystemTap eliminates the need for the developer to go through the tedious and disruptive instrument, recompile, install, and reboot sequence that may be otherwise required to collect data.

The recent addition of kprobes to the Linux kernel provides the needed support but is not easy to use. SystemTap provides a simple command line interface and scripting language for writing instrumentation for a live running kernel. Over time, we plan to enlarge our script "tapset" library to aid instrumentation reuse and abstraction. We also plan to support probing userspace applications. We are investigating interfacing Systemtap with similar tools such as Frysk, Oprofile and LTT.

I'd advise people to change their default settings, but one time I had "write memory contents to log file on BSOD" enabled when I was moving data about, and hand less free memory on my HD than in RAM.

I wouldn't trust an option like that to begin with. Something unexplained happened in the kernel - probably memory corruption. In this broken state, are you going to trust the filesystem code to update all those complex data structures correctly? The traditional Unix answer is to write to a dedicated crash partition, which is much simpler. The RedHat answer is to not touch the disk at all - instead, send the data over the network. It's much harder to damage anything while doing that.

I think this is pretty much the file you forgot:

http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/ 4/en/os/i386/SRPMS/sg3_utils-1.06-3.src.rpm

That is an SRPM. Red Hat doesn't seem to provide binary RPM files
for ES4. You should have an rpmbuild command that will build that
into a regular rpm. The rpm command itself used to be able to build
from source; probably the ability still exists in RHEL ES4.

Debian certainly provides sg_scan.

As for ifconfig: that is kind of obsolete now. It's a compatibility
hack that uses a sort of BSD emulation layer. Getting to know the
more-powerful native tools (the ip command) would be a good idea.

"Joerg Schilling is doing excellent work. But as some others have commented there seem to be personal issues. So it is a shame that they had to use such a lame excuse to boot him. I am pretty sure the fork will go nowhere or at best use patches from Joerg Schilling proving that there never were incompatible licences."

It is not only Debian that has problems with cdrtools. Fedora forked cdrtools over two weeks ago because the latest versions of cdrtools are not distributable due license violations in the cdrtools package.

Check the thread starting with buildsys report: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/ 2006-August/msg00644.html

More information in this message: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/ 2006-August/msg00652.html

"Joerg Schilling is doing excellent work. But as some others have commented there seem to be personal issues. So it is a shame that they had to use such a lame excuse to boot him. I am pretty sure the fork will go nowhere or at best use patches from Joerg Schilling proving that there never were incompatible licences."

It is not only Debian that has problems with cdrtools. Fedora forked cdrtools over two weeks ago because the latest versions of cdrtools are not distributable due license violations in the cdrtools package.

Check the thread starting with buildsys report: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/ 2006-August/msg00644.html

More information in this message: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/ 2006-August/msg00652.html

I manage the K12OSN (K12OpenSourceNow) list hosted by RedHat.com. None of our Comcast members are receiving posts. So the best answer seems to be, keep on paying for your connection but don't use their service.

Rhapsody (limited free service to comcast members) however is a GREAT product. I'll keep paying my $42/month.

More control of my computer by me, instead of by someone else.

I keep hearing about stuff like "all your base are belong to thin clients and remote servers" whenever someone mentions the future of OSes and that deeply disturbs me, especially the part about remote storage of data and subscription based access to remotely hosted apps. Forget morphing; I would prefer changing my OS settings as I please. In fact, give me OS the option where I can save my settings to a profile and then load up a profile to fit what I'm doing.

I'll pay more for having everything on my hard drive, under my control, without any need to phone home to authorize further usage of my media, software or OS. Unfortunately we the sheeple are being herded towards the digital corporate nanny state where the corporations decide what we'll get and these little heuristic tricks the OS of tomorrow will do for us, will give us the illusion that we have control.

Funny how it is that to get the kind of extra value I desire, I need to actually pay less. Ok, so I'll purchase a support contract, does that count as "paying more"?

Force them to watch a couple hours of Big Brother or (your country) Idol. That's torture to me.

It's torture to any h. sapiens watching the shows to see members of their race to sink so low, but the monkeys will probably be just happy to see the so-called higher simians to fall from grace... Or has someone proved conclusively that schadenfreude is exclusive to humans? I doubt that, given that the monkeys punch each others to genitals and all that. =)

A lot of people here seem quite opposed to the idea that Linux becoming mainstream has tangible benefits and in fact seem to believe that it will actually hurt the application of Linux towards their interests.

I don't agree with this belief.

First consider the supposed drawbacks, the main being that the move towards increase usability for the masses will cripple the technical user. However, Apple has already successfully done the opposite with OS X, creating an OS usable for the technical user without compromising usability for the masses. Now I personally find the OS X interface a little constraining when I do technical work on a Mac but I consider this a good sign rather than a bad sign. With Apple, where a user friendly operating system tried to become technical, when the two considerations come into conflict the usability aspect wins. With Linux, where the core constituent is technical (particularly due to the grassroots developer base) I believe that when the two come into conflict that the technical user will win out.

Moreover, the nature of Linux means one can largely ignore the eye-candy one doesn't like. I don't use graphical file browsers nor many other graphical applications for routine tasks (copying files, extracting tarballs, burning CDs), however, when a task comes up for which I don't know the command line tools I'll often start with a graphical tool just to get a feel for the process. I'm not aware of any instance (other than Gnome removing the terminal from the context menu) where a push towards greater usability has harmed the technical user (btw the gnome thing just needs nautilus-open-terminal).

As for benefits, they are numerous, the biggest being involved in the future of the internet. How much of the internet and consumer devices are being built around DRM-loaded music stores and proprietary codecs and technologies? It's already happening, iTunes under Linux? Maybe using some pseudo-legal project or wine (haven't tried), Linux users are finding themselves locked out of a lot of places the internet is going and are being forced to make some very serious compromises if they want to go along for the ride. I feel the only way to combat this 1) Legisation mandating all formats and technologies be open (like that's going to happen) or 2) Linux acquires a significant marketshare. In addition by spreading Linux to people who aren't fully aware of FLOSS we start spreading some of those ideas to a wider audience and showing them they can succeed. Heck, maybe we give some of these developers stuck re-implementing proprietary wheels something more productive to do with their time.

Is some level of compromise necessary currently? I'd hazard no just because I think with google installing proprietary codecs like lame should be simple enought for any user technically advanced enough to use Linux on a regular basis as to not justify sacrificing our ideals. However, in the end and as Linux usability improves further a little pragmatism in select cases might do a lot more to service freedom than a strict adherance to open source principals.

It's nice for RMS to quantify his position by saying "By Free I mean Freedom" but the end result is the same. Perhaps someone can post a time when Richard said, "Yeah, the price on this software is just right" and there is actually a dollar amount specified. The truth is, there's a need for paid software. Paid for software produces some good stuff. It's not the endall but it has a right to exist. It feeds a fundemental human need, to be compensated. Glory alone is not a system of compensation and never will be.

Thank you for the link. I have read through the complete mailing list archive and it seems like their is a real process running to make Fedora a FSF approved and recommend GNU/Linux distribution. Yesterday 'spot' posted a new status: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-bo ard/2006-August/msg00271.html and it seems like it's almost done.

It looks really good to me and Fedora could become my new No.1 distribution in the near future (if i can part from my habit of doing it the "Debian-way" ;) ).

I've been a Fedora user since RH8, and still am. This Q&A and the discussion hasn't touched on some areas of Fedora's place in the world that seem important to me.

Firstly, in comparison with Ubuntu, Max Spevak mentions that Ubuntu's web presence is better organized. IMHO, this is a reflection of the fact that Ubuntu has a much better-organized community. Community is the primary difference between Fedora and Ubuntu, and it's not a superficial difference.

Second, I don't see much discussion of Max Spevak's role or discussion of Fedora leadership in general. From a mere user's point of view, Fedora has lacked for a guiding hand. Developers who (deservedly) "own" their fiefdoms get to make decisions, but you need someone at a higher level to help keep an even keel and referee the bigger picture. A decent example of this is here, where the Fedora Advisory Board ultimately made the decision to prevent some needless chaos for nvidia driver users that would have been caused by an X.org update. Holding the update for the upcoming FC6 release was a stroke of wisdom IMO, but even if you disagree, it's still an example of project-level leadership.

Additional leadership might help resolve situations like this. There has been much dysfunctional hostility between the "official" Fedora repo folks and the unofficial ones. This is the opposite of community building.

Another place where a guiding hand is useful is maintaining consistency on the desktop. Early versions of Fedora had a consistent look. Now my panel icons are drifting away from any unifying theme. For example, wireshark, firefox, and the Fedora menu all have icons that don't fit visually with any installed theme.

One place Fedora suffers for its lack of community is that usability (that is, the perspective of end-users) is not a key focus for developers. (Network manager would be a *shining* exception, you folks rock.) End-users are ghettoized in forums and lists that developers rarely go near. There is no usability champion. It doesn't "feel" like a priorty in Fedora. (But again, props to the FAB for the X.org update decision.)

An example of where Ubuntu "gets it" when it comes to real-world usability would be the way that package updates are handled. Notification is automatic, and users are already in sudoers or something, so they only need their own password to authorize the updates. (Imperfect yes, but it "Just works" for the most common use-case of a desktop system, and is pre-configured out of the box. Even Aunt Tilly can handle it.)

I haven't switched to Ubuntu myself yet, but I have started installing it for the friends/family for whom I am the go-to-geek, because for them usability trumps all.

I'll be interested to see if Ubuntu can follow through over time, and if Fedora can put down community roots.

I've been a Fedora user since RH8, and still am. This Q&A and the discussion hasn't touched on some areas of Fedora's place in the world that seem important to me.

Firstly, in comparison with Ubuntu, Max Spevak mentions that Ubuntu's web presence is better organized. IMHO, this is a reflection of the fact that Ubuntu has a much better-organized community. Community is the primary difference between Fedora and Ubuntu, and it's not a superficial difference.

Second, I don't see much discussion of Max Spevak's role or discussion of Fedora leadership in general. From a mere user's point of view, Fedora has lacked for a guiding hand. Developers who (deservedly) "own" their fiefdoms get to make decisions, but you need someone at a higher level to help keep an even keel and referee the bigger picture. A decent example of this is here, where the Fedora Advisory Board ultimately made the decision to prevent some needless chaos for nvidia driver users that would have been caused by an X.org update. Holding the update for the upcoming FC6 release was a stroke of wisdom IMO, but even if you disagree, it's still an example of project-level leadership.

Additional leadership might help resolve situations like this. There has been much dysfunctional hostility between the "official" Fedora repo folks and the unofficial ones. This is the opposite of community building.

Another place where a guiding hand is useful is maintaining consistency on the desktop. Early versions of Fedora had a consistent look. Now my panel icons are drifting away from any unifying theme. For example, wireshark, firefox, and the Fedora menu all have icons that don't fit visually with any installed theme.

One place Fedora suffers for its lack of community is that usability (that is, the perspective of end-users) is not a key focus for developers. (Network manager would be a *shining* exception, you folks rock.) End-users are ghettoized in forums and lists that developers rarely go near. There is no usability champion. It doesn't "feel" like a priorty in Fedora. (But again, props to the FAB for the X.org update decision.)

An example of where Ubuntu "gets it" when it comes to real-world usability would be the way that package updates are handled. Notification is automatic, and users are already in sudoers or something, so they only need their own password to authorize the updates. (Imperfect yes, but it "Just works" for the most common use-case of a desktop system, and is pre-configured out of the box. Even Aunt Tilly can handle it.)

I haven't switched to Ubuntu myself yet, but I have started installing it for the friends/family for whom I am the go-to-geek, because for them usability trumps all.

I'll be interested to see if Ubuntu can follow through over time, and if Fedora can put down community roots.

Great questions. Yes indeed, Fedora has thought about that. The last status report for the licensing audit was https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-bo ard/2006-August/msg00227.html

And that it works so well out of the box. It's good to hear that Fedora is thinking of killing Extras as a separate project and moving to a repository-based system.

He's rather adamant about Fedora not being a beta for RH. Personally I was never under the impression that it was a beta of anything (aside from the fact that I found the second release to be rather unstable). RH did a fairly good job of splitting it off by explaining the differences betwen their two main audiences: (a) people who pay and (b) people who want the latest packages.

And that it works so well out of the box. It's good to hear that Fedora is thinking of killing Extras as a separate project and moving to a repository-based system.

He's rather adamant about Fedora not being a beta for RH. Personally I was never under the impression that it was a beta of anything (aside from the fact that I found the second release to be rather unstable). RH did a fairly good job of splitting it off by explaining the differences betwen their two main audiences: (a) people who pay and (b) people who want the latest packages.

What's this Fedora Project all about? Is it good or is it whack?

just wondering how related stateless linux http://fedora.redhat.com/About/Projects/stateless. html might fit here.

You can also find a 3rd party patch for this here: http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/

better patches here:

http://fedora.redhat.com/

It has everything to do with GPL compliance... we have a composite work here all on a disk that contains proprietary and gpl work. I can't redistribute the composite work because of those proprietary chunks...

So? The GPL states that if you distribute something derived from a GPL work, you have to provide the source. Red Hat does this. The GPL doesn't have anything to say about putting GPL'd work along with proprietary work on the same storage medium, thus it is in no way a compliance issue. So although you're inconvenienced and maybe you think it sucks, it's perfectly fine according to the GPL.

NVIDIA don't want the 'open source' driver to be too good. They prefer us to continue to suckle at the teat of their proprietary offering.

Besides, they are only technically open source. The 'nv' driver is basically undocumented and pretty much unmaintainable by anyone other than an NVIDIA employee.

Microsoft makes a lot of money with operating systems. But [...] they are literally the only company succeeding with an OS-only (no hardware) strategy.

Are you sure?

Has there been any more thought on bringing out the other products acquired from Netscape? I'd love to be able to deploy the Calendar and Messaging Servers.

We're working on getting it into Fedora Extras, but the wheels of progress grind slowly . . . stay tured to http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/ in the next couple of months.

While Ubuntu has a clear, selfless mission, it seems to me the Fedora project misses this. I'm sure while Fedora was still within Red Hat, its mission was simply commercial. "It must be good so we can make money." That mission no longer applies, and http://fedora.redhat.com/About/ almost sounds like Fedora is just a rejected part of Red Hat, left Free so that they could attempt to profit from community contributions.

Is there an objective in the Fedora Project? One that is clear and may motivate developers to join? Or is it here really just to reduce costs for the Red Hat team?

I like google groups better than the google linux search, but I don't think either are the best sites. IMHO any site that purports to have all answers to all linux questions isn't going to do very well with any semi-complex question. They just can't have the know-how.

IRC channels are good, but it is kind of like IM - if the devs aren't on you're out of luck.

I think it really depends on the distro. For Ubuntu, there is Ubuntu forums for SuSE there are SuSE forums. The same goes for Gentoo, Mepis, Debian, Redhat, Fedora or any other distro out there. The larger projects also have their own forums.

Getting as specific a location as you can will help (e.g. the google group on Debian is better than the one on Linux users for Debian problems). That is why IRC is great when you have a reasonably well-researched and specific question. Before you ask a dev (who may be working on fixing the problem, or may have already fixed it, or may be plagued by the same question over and over again) please read how to ask a question properly. That way you are maximizing the chance that you get the right answer, people won't get mad at you, and you won't be wasting anyone else's time.

I don't think you have to be strapped for cash in order to not want to buy RHEL. It's really expensive. We've got about a dozen Linux servers here. If we put RHEL on all of them instead of Fedora (or some other free distro), it would cost us more than $4000/year just for updates (the $349 option doesn't actually provide much in the way of actual support). And if I had an extra $4000/year, I'd much rather buy more servers or upgrade existing servers than spend money on updates that I can get for free by using another distribution. Having to upgrade the OS every 2 years or so is mildly annoying, but realistically, a lot of servers get rebuilt on that timescale anyway for totally unrelated reasons (hardware failure, previous function no longer relevant, move to better hardware, ...), so the amount of extra work it creates in practice isn't that much.

So, by that logic, let's consider the following. Linux IS a competitor for MS in the OS market. The home Market as well as server. Linux is provided for free (most distros), and people can pay for tech support if needed. Given the knowledge of the user base, Linux stands to make a lot of money giving Tech Support (hopefully not in the form of "RTFM YOU N00B!"). Even if computers are not coming with Linux pre-installed, it's a free download. So what's stopping people from doing it? Is Microsoft standing over every User's shoulder saying "I'll kill you if you download that."?

Nothing's stopping people from doing it. However, think of the newbie users who go to the store to purchase their first computer. They have a choice between Microsoft Windows, which most or all their friends use and which they've seen in TV commercials, or Mac OS X, for which they've seen on a few commercials and a few of their friends may be using, or Linux, which either a few of their computer expert friends use and have mentioned to them or which they've never heard of. Unless they've brought someone with them who has a decided preference for one of those OSes, which one do you think New B. User will purchase?

In addition, users have gotten used to plug-and-play -- if a piece of hardware doesn't work when you plug it it, even if it's not supposed to, users think something's wrong -- the hardware isn't working or there's a bug in the OS. Windows does this best (they have the marker share to encourage hardware manufacturers to test and make sure their hardware works with Windows), I think Mac OS X is second, and Linux is last.

Longer support guarantees (7 years for https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/) are indeed one major reason. The enterprise distributions also generally have a slower release cycle so there is a perception of better stability, which makes the upgrade churn is not as difficult for enterprises or for hardware driver vendors. Additionally the enterprise distributions usually have better support for high-end storage and networking hardware such as SAN and fiberchannel, which the hobbyist-distributions generally don't have enough users with such equipment.

"The problem with windows security is primarily one of legacy support."

Noncense, backward compatibility should not break security. Windows was sold as suitable for secure use in a networked environment. It was even given C2 security certification. The problem is the WinNT memory management unit running under the x86 processor. Something that was first tackled under Linux with Exec Shield. The Windows version called NX can be bypassed as otherwise JIT bytecode won't work.

"inter-processes communication was flawed lacking any authentication method, kernel / userland seperation was virtually nonexistant,"

Wait a minute WinNT was touted as being more secure because of it's use of operating modes. Ring 0 had full access while user apps were restricted to Ring 3, the highest restriction. At least that was the theory.

"these issues persisted right up till XP when microsoft started to take security seriously with SP2."

Er, They still persist. See here, much of this code is included in Windows Server 2003 and will be included in Longhorn

"Microsoft just like the rest of us is new to the whole OS design thing."

When Microsoft hired on the Digital VAX/VMS team they had an oppurtunity to design a secure OS. Most of the defects in the OS can be traced to managment decisions to favor features over security. Embedding Internet Explorer in the OS was one such decision.

"What needs to be done is .. implement a version of windows that incorporates everything we've learned over the last 20 years or so"

If by "We" you mean Microsoft, "We" haven't learned anything since 1988, 18 years ago. Why wait, why not upgrade to SuSE, all the eye candy of Vista without the security vulnerabilities.

I see a lot of this kind of revisionist history on the Internet and in the media. Is there a whole department that does nothing all day but pollute the athmosphere with self serving distortions such as this. How anyone say this with a straight face is beyond me.

'the security kernel of the Windows NT server software was written before the Internet,
and the Windows Server 2003 software was written
before buffer overflows became a frequent target of recent attacks'

David Aucsmith, Security Architect, Microsoft.

Basic Support for RHEL AS is $1500 too, you know, and that's anually. Not taking sides here, but it's simply not true to say "Linux is free" in a commercial environment.

Here is a mirror of rpms for all redhat users.... Pretty Cool

If I have a problem I can quickly find if other people have the same problem. That's a great tool.

But the problem is that Oracle goes through bugzilla and marks all the bugs that affect Oracle private. For example I was researching NFS bugs and at first I had access to this bug but then Oracle hid it.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=193077

Honesty about bugs is the best thing about Open Source and RedHat. Oracle is not ever going to learn that. SuSE is just now starting to learn that. They still don't have their enterprise products set up in bugzilla.

I'm an open-source developer (Ultima Linux, PyWord – just to name a few. And yet I'm living on the east coast of the U.S. In fact, so's Red Hat. Not to mention Slackware, now in Minnesota, or even MySQL, who's all the way over in Sweden. I've also noticed a lot of my users tend to be from European countries – Germany, France, Sweden, England, Ireland... and that's only counting a small handful. Oh, and Linus himself is in Portland, Oregon, which is a bit closer but still not in the valley. So unless I'm missing the point entirely, I'd have to say the article must be completely wrong...

DISCLAIMER: I will admit I haven't read the article yet, so I probably am missing the point, but may as well post anyway, since this is Slashdot ;-)

move now... there's so much choice, but i'll recomend http://fedora.redhat.com/

I'm amazed there's no mention of this yet, with all the fuss about XGL and Compiz recently...
The FC development repo (so I assume FC6T1 has it as well) includes AIGLX, a different approach to the accelerated desktop thing. The metacity that comes with Core has support for a few effects (like wobbling windows), but if you want to try the cube and othe compiz goodies, Kristian has an RPM of compiz for AIGLX here. Just install it and voilá: eye candy goodness.

Helllllllo ?!? Red Hat already have a desktop product, and always had. Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS -> http://www.redhat.com/rhel/details/clients/

It's based on Fedora Core 3, just like the rest of the RHEL 4.

I hate to be the Red Hat shill, but damn, there's a lot of uninformed opinions about Red Hat going on around here.

Please ensure that brain is in gear before engaging mouth.

POSIX Threads for Win32 compability layer. 'Nuff Said.