On June 11 in the Arab News “Letters to the Editor” column, an opinion titled “Linux vs. Windows” by Ahmad Alafaliq made reference to Forrester’s 2004 study: “Is Linux More Secure Than Windows?”
In the letter there was no disclosure of the fact that Alafaliq is an employee of Microsoft Arabia. Alafaliq considered the letter to Arab News to be a “personal not corporate effort.” Additionally, there was no mention made of the “Joint Statement about GNU/Linux Security” issued by the vendors Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat and SUSE (Novell).
The executive summary of that Linux vendor statement reads, “Despite the report’s claim to incorporate a qualitative assessment of vendor reactions to serious vulnerabilities, it treats all vulnerabilities as equal, regardless of their risk to users. As a result, the conclusions drawn by Forrester have extremely limited real-world value for customers assessing the practical issue of how quickly serious vulnerabilities get fixed.”
The full text of the statement is available at http://www.debian.org/News/2004/20040406.
It should be noted that on June 10, Novell won the right to pursue two claims in a US lawsuit against Microsoft over Novell’s Word Perfect software. Arab News always aims to ensure that all vendors receive balanced coverage on our pages.
