The 2.6 Linux production kernel, shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell and other major Linux software vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis. This is according to a four-year analysis of the Linux source code conducted by five Stanford University computer science researchers.
It's not a bad track record, but I would caution Linux phans to carefully consider how long Windows has been on the market v. Linux before putting their foot in their mouth over this particular statistic.
I don't care one way or the other (software as a tool and all), but you should also note that Microsoft Windows 3.0 is only one year older than the linux kernel's first version. And you can't say that I'm comparing apples to oranges because the linux kernel was in an early state back then. The Windows kernel, if I remember correctly, was rather horrible, too!
Actually, I'd say linux was ready for the enterprise before the Windows NT kernel was.
Linux’s first production release(1.0) was in 1994. The Windows XP codebase originates a little before with Windows NT3.0. Prior versions of Windows(Win9x & Win 3.x) had a DOS foundation and are entirely different.
The Linux codebase is significantly smaller because of difference in philosophy on what constitutes an OS. Consequently you will find very little integrated with the Linux OS compared to Windows. OSS developers are also less pressured to ship on a schedule as opposed to when it’s ready. All other things being equal, this means fewer bugs.
Of course, nobody apart from Microsoft knows the bug density in Windows code. So comparing the two is really not worthwhile, espesially since we are talking about theoretical bug counts worked out by using code analysis tools, it is entirely possible that Windows has a lower bug density when analysed by the same tools. However that's not going to happen in the public domain in the forseeable future. Microsoft does use these tools to analyse their own code though.
