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Bill Gates: Windows Patched Faster than Linux
petard writes "In a very interesting interview published by the Register, Bill Gates made several interesting claims about Longhorn. Many of them have been extensively covered recently, including plans to force users to patch automatically. Surprisingly, everyone seems to have overlooked his statement that Microsoft fixes bugs faster than Linux developers do. 'We've gone from little over 40 hours on average to 24 hours. With Linux, that would be a couple of weeks on average.' Either he's lying or woefully misinformed; their recent performance seems to be more on the order of 3+ months, or over 2000 hours."
Why do you think they are giving Linux so much attention these days? I think this means we are now in between the "They laughed at us" and "They tried to fight us" part.
And if we follow Mahatma Gandhi's approach, the best approach is to keep doing what we do while letting MS bash away. Eventually it will become quite evident as to which side is interested in doing good for their fellow man.
Un-news
"And most likely, it's being mis-measured by someone."
It's certainly being mismeasured by the Linux community. While I haven't done a thorough study, I make note of a Konqueror patch that came out last year.
- Linux community touted it as proof patches were fast, because it was into the source tree in 90 minutes
- It took one month before KDE released a new binary compiled with the patch
- It took an additional month before Redhat incorporated this into a patch for their Linux distribution.
The issue also impacted IE, and it took Microsoft two weeks to release a binary patch on Windows Update.
The Linux community claimed 90 minutes, when it was really two months.
Microsoft counted it accurately as two weeks.
Just reporting good news to yourself doesn't make you better.