freeform goodness

I don't know that monoculture is solely to blame for the current vulnerability of the Internet. Sure, it's dangerous precipice but a security problem is required to push us over. Take Cisco, for example, with between 60% and 70% of the market (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/2002/05/17/cisco-market-share.htm ) IOS is very close to a monoculture. Apache has IIS beat by a mile (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html) which also comes pretty close to a monoculture. While neither approaches Microsoft's 80%-95% market share, a vulnerability in either would be devastating. And yet, Microsoft is the only vendor to suffer from repeated worms and viruses. Monoculture contributes to the problem by turning an infection into an epidemic, but without Microsoft's consistent disregard for security we wouldn't find ourselves in the state we're in.

Good point.

The one immediate difference I can see between Windows and IOS is that IOS tends to be deployed by professionals, usually trained at significant expense. Your typical internet-connected Cisco switch or router is an expensive device being supported by dedicated staff, either in-house or contracted. In contrast, the tens of millions of Windows machines that consumers (as opposed to businesses) buy every year are self-supported by people who, in 90% of cases, couldn’t tell you what TCP/IP is, and in 99.9% of cases couldn’t tell you what RPC or a buffer overflow is. Where Microsoft really errs, and the linked article points this out, is in shipping a consumer OS with so many services running and ports opened by default. The philosophy that pretty much every technical Unix distribution has adopted, which is to require an explicit user decision to enable all network-facing services, is a far better fit to Windows’ audience than the philosophy Microsoft actually follows.

Alright, I agree. That obit is pretty damn good. I like the idea of people supporting the removal of Bush better.