Screaming Penguin

"There's no reason to believe [Linux] will be higher quality. I'm not going to say it will be worse," he said. Ballmer pointed as an example to the improvements Microsoft has made between Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. In the first 150 days after Windows 2000 was released, he said, Cern found 17 critical vulnerabilities. In the first 150 days after Microsoft launched Windows 2003, there were four critical vulnerabilities. "In the first 150 days of Red Hat's 6.0, it was five to 10 times that [number of vulnerabilities]," Ballmer said.

Well, OK. People KNEW RH6 sucked when it came out, though. I would be curious to see Win2K vs RHEL AS 2.0 and Win2K3 vs RHEL AS 3.0 though. Seriously, for your average Linux box on the internet, what do you really have to worry about? A BIND patch 2x a year, a SendMail patch 2x a year, a critical Apache patch 1x a year and an SSH patch maybe every 18 months. Thats a far cry from the IIS bug dujour. update: better coverage at The Reg