Yesterday there was an article on Yahoo! News about Windows Server 2003 being more reliable than Linux. There is a lot of discussion about this particular article on Slashdot. Although a lot of the discussion centers around the author and whether she is unbiased or not there were some good points. For instance the quote from the article

"Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."

has a lot of people up in arms. It is not really clear what the statistic is supposed to mean. I suppose it is possible that for every minute that Windows is down a Linux box could be down for a few seconds longer, but does it really mean anything to the users? The problem that I see with a 20% statistic is that it is meaningless without some kind of context. The numbers quoted in the article don't seem to make sense to me so here is my example of why I think the percentage number might sell newspapers but it doesn't help make decisions.

Using the 20% more downtime as a basis for the calculation I came up with the following statistics. If the Windows server is down for 2 minutes then the Linux server would be down for 2 minutes 48 seconds. Not really that big of a deal and not really noticeable to the average end user. As the amount of down time for a system goes down the 20% becomes less and less of an issue.

I think the main takeaway from the article should be the following quote:

On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio, the major server operating systems all have a "high degree of reliability," and have showed marked improvement in the last 3 to 5 years.

As long as we are heading in the right direction the competition between Windows and Linux will help all of us to have better, more reliable products. That seems like a win-win situation to me.