[stomachmonkey]

You guys are completely missing the point.

The reason that .nix OS's are more secure than the products from Redmond has more to do with how the foundation was laid for the environment that they were used in which had a direct impact on how security was approached.

The simple "it's lack of market share" is an opinion that no one can prove or disprove. The simple logic that with the introduction of OSX (when Apple had even less market share) Mac viruses disappeared is a fact that anyone can validate in about 5 minutes. Tagging it's not worth the effort onto it is yet another convenient opinion and does not show a lot of thought on the subject.

UNIX, (which OS X is based on) was originally developed to be used in a shared environment. Many users logging into the same hardware or many users sharing the same piece of hardware. From the outset separation of user accounts from each other and from the core of the system was critical. You can't have 20 or more scientists banging around crunching experimental code that could take out everyone else if something went wrong.

Then along came the Personal Computer. It's affordable to give everyone their own computer. Remember no internet access and closed networks in offices. Now you can do whatever you want on your computer, blow it up all day long and the only one that it creates an issue for is yourself. You don't affect the other users.

So both Apple and MSFT took a different approach to the OS. Let's make it user friendly and we can do away with all the segmentation and additional security stuff, it's not needed, one user per PC.

Things went along fairly OK. Viruses were generally spread by sharing floppies with an affected file but it was pretty easy to identify and shut down.

Then along came the Internet. Now it's possible to cause widespread destruction in a matter of hours. The Internet basically turned all those individual computers back into that one shared computer from 30 years ago. Overnight my personal computer had the ability to take down any other computer on the planet all by itself.

Viruses abound for both Windows PC's and Macs.

Here's were the split occurs. Apple understands that their current OS is out of date with the current computing environment. That a .nix based OS is better suited for the way we use computers today.

So why the Myth that it's all about market share, think about this. Symantec have about 70% market share in the security business and booked just north of $5 Billion in revenue. There are a lot of people making a lot of money that would hate to see big chunks of it go away.

Are .nix OS's vulnerable, yes they are. Are they more secure, absolutely.