Category: OS

Mi2g, which provides digital risk management research, said 67% of all successful overt digital attacks was done against the Linux OS, which has exploded in popularity but in the U.S. and abroad. Attacks against Linux were three times higher than against Microsoft Windows, which accounted for 23.2%, Mi2g reported.

The study found a huge gap in software maintenance costs incurred by the two approaches, due in large part to the price difference between the BEA Inc. and Oracle Corp. software that Forrester compared to VisualStudio .Net and Microsoft SQL Server. Software maintenance in a large organization was estimated at $160,000 annually for a Linux/J2EE development effort, as compared with just under $46,000 for Microsoft users. In medium-sized businesses, the costs were $17,775 and $7,158 respectively.

Forrester estimated that the total cost of developing a custom Linux/J2EE application and supporting it for three years would be just over $2.2 million. On the Microsoft platform, the cost dropped to the $1.6 million range.

Licensing, associated software, maintenance, labor, and training was 25% to 28% cheaper on Windows for certain types of applications. For large companies, the cost of making and deploying applications on Microsoft’s .NET standard was $1.64 million over a three-year period, 28 percent less than the $2.29 million cost for running or J2EE/Linux, according to the study. For medium-sized companies, costs for .NET-based applications totaled $661,012, compared with $881,445 for J2EE/Linux.

88% of computers use Windows and only 8% run on Linux.

According to a report in today’s Taipei Times, there are around 20 Taiwanese companies making Linux products, such as server applications and embedded products, but the Taiwanese government hopes to increase that number to 50 by 2007.

The authorities are also setting a target to have 10% of PCs and 30% of Internet servers used by government agencies and corporate networks run on a Linux-based system by 2007