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Richard Stallman Even if you believe it is perfectly okay to charge for software, it is hard to know what to charge consumers for software. Microsoft used to charge a fixed amount for a server product. However, one day they realized that customers who had 10 users connected to a server should be paying less than those who had 100. This observation resulted in the creation of client access licenses (CALs); a concept that required payment for each individual user of server software, but which is an additional burden on the customer.

When the computer is attacked by a virus, the virus can gain the same capabilities as the user and can therefore hide itself inside system files, which make it very difficult to remove. On Linux, I can write only to my own files and have read-only access to all others. Linux's multiuser nature, and therefore its focus on minimal permissions, minimizes any damage. One study found that there are about 60,000 known viruses for Windows, and only about 40 for Linux. Another study by Evans Data showed that 8% of Linux developers say their machines have been infected by malicious code, compared to 60% of Windows machines.

Scott Granneman Attempting to compare the security of operating systems is a complicated endeavor because there are an infinite number of risks. It is like asking whether one car is safer than another. Against what: Getting hit from the front? Rolling over? Having the gas tank pierced? Its ability to brake? 30 Linux Furthermore, neither Windows nor Linux are perfectly secure operating systems; both are prone to buffer-overrun viruses, an issue I will discuss in the tools chapter. Furthermore, new threats appear over time, and so each nefarious advancement requires new logic to defend against it.