Why do people use Internet Explorer or Outlook? There have been more security holes in IE and Outlook than all competing software combined*. It's bad enough that a bug in IE or Outlook will crash the browser or spam people, but how's this for a goodie? In the past couple days, a bug in IE has come to light that will FORMAT YOUR HARD DRIVE.

Why is Microsoft incompetent? That's a rhetorical question. A better question is, why do people USE Microsoft now that open source alternatives are available? The benefit of open source is that security holes (and, indeed, any kind of bug) like this get spotted and squelched much more quickly. And it is *impossible* for nosy corporations to put backdoors into their software and attempt to do stealthy sorts of things like upload hardware profiles back to the company.

I know why some people don't use Linux -- although its window managers are coming along, making it less and less important that users of Linux be technically knowledgeable, Linux still has some work to do regarding how easy it is to set up a new system. But the software that's available for Linux is incredible now, and it's ALL FREE. Why pay a skillion dollars for Microsoft Office, when you can download Open Office for Linux free? There is free accounting software, free image manipulation software, and free development tools. Some of this free stuff is less mature software than the commercial Windows counterparts, but open source software almost always ultimately surpasses its competition just because there are many more eyes looking at the code, and the developers who work on it are doing it because they want to, not because they have to put in the hours at a desk.

I use Windows at home, primarily because I am not confident about setting up the machine to recognize all the hardware. I confess I like a lot of things about Windows XP, in particular how being notified of new patches, downloading them, and installing them is all automated. But it's scary what I actually *get* for patches. Every week, I get one or two more security patches. Most of these are for IE or Outlook, which I do not use, and some are for the operating system itself. It's scary how much less secure Microsoft products are EVEN WITH PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE. The source code for Netscape and Mozilla, the Apache web server, and the Linux operating system are all open source, and it's STILL harder to find security holes. Not that they are perfect either, but still.

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*I'm not sure if I'm exaggerating, but it would not surprise me to learn that I'm not.