Microsoft Is Way Too Lazy to Fix Its Bugs

[Dark Star]

Microsoft software versus open source software has been, and still is a never-ending debatable issue. Both camps have harsh supporters who claim their favorite is the best. Personally, I think that both sides have their own ups and downs and you cannot just say one of them is better. Just because one suits you better, doesn't imply the other is lame.

However,there are some situations where you can say it loud and clear that some of them just do not do a certain task properly. And that's what I'm gonna do now. I'll stood up and point out to Microsoft who didn't took proper care of solving the bugs and flaws in its Windows operating systems. And I'm going to do that based on their own vulnerability scorecard, published by Jeff Jones on its Security blog.

According to the vulnerability release, the Microsoft team wasn't able to fix more Windows flaws than the number of open software flaws fixed by the major open source companies. Ouch!, that doesn't sound good at all. Let's think about Red Hat for example. Red Hat Inc. company happens to have forty times less employees than Microsoft does, but still fixed and closed most of their security bugs, including the minor bugs. Regarding the minor bugs, here Microsoft didn’t even fix one minor bug during the same period.

Red Hat impressed its customers by fixing numerous flaws in the RHEL 5 version. Unlike Red Hat, Microsoft can brag with only a few Vista bugs fixed. I don't know about you, but this report actually makes me wonder just how trustworthy Windows Vista can be when it comes to security when the Microsoft guys pay "so much" attention to it. If interested, you can see with your own eyes the charts that emphasize Microsoft's recent laziness.

Source : http://blogs.technet.com/security/archive/2007/08/16/july-2007-operating-system-vulnerability-scorecard.aspx

[stinger30au]

it has its users doing the testing for it even now, thats why when a program crashes it has a dialog box that says "im sorry,but i just crashed, want me to report this to m/s so they may attempt to fix this at their leisure and maybe one day it may actually work"...

well it doesnt say exactly that, but you get the idea

[wolfen69]

my avatar says it all.

[insane_alien]

there is also the way MS classed the fixes. what would be classified as a minor bug in vista was classified as major bug in linux distros etc. etc.

it was a very skewed result.

[kulturloseramerikaner]

Another thing that keeps happening is more crap keeps getting tacked on to Windows, and it keeps getting bigger and more bloated. On the 'Nix kernel, 2.20 is actually smaller than the previous 2.18 and it does more. Open source sofware has many more eyes looking at it, so someone can come along and say "hey, if you change this line of code so, you can get rid of these 2 over here," and the OS becomes faster and more efficient.
Of course, the other flip side to tacking on more is that the new code has its own bugs you have to cope with, new security holes, etc. and the problem perpetuates.

[3rdalbum]

I attempted to submit a bug report to Microsoft. It wasn't when a program had actually crashed - it was a glitch somewhere in there that stopped Windows and programs from being able to work with files and directories that contained colons in their names. And in the process of trying, it would throw all manner of errors, none of which correctly stated the problem.

So I tried submitting this bug report to Microsoft. I tried to find contact details outside the US. I tried for an hour. I failed. Mate, if the Ext3 driver in Linux was throwing errors with file paths containing colons, the kernel developers would want to hear about it, and the thing would get fixed pretty quick smart. Microsoft obviously couldn't care.