It won't be popular for a variety of reasons, the foremost two being:
1. It's a very dumb metric, for reasons stated well downthread and for many others (the bewildering number of off-by-default hardware and kernel features many of those vulns appear in being another).
2. The fairly obvious rebuttal that things Linus says on message boards actually have little to do with the security of Linux, and that the particular thing Linus said this time has practically nothing to do with the security of Linux.
With the possible exception of OpenBSD†, nobody clueful picks server platforms other than Linux with the expectation that it is going to be easier to keep them secure on the Internet.
† Reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which OBSD is a win; in 2011, I'd rather have Spengler on my side than Theo.
It is not a very good proxy for how likely you are to get 0wned. It is available, though, and I'm not convinced that it's so bad that a 5x (Linux kernel/FreeBSD) or 9.4x (Linux kernel/OpenBSD) difference still doesn't say anything.
Linus' words don't affect code quality; but wanting to move quickly does, and Linux does move quickly. I agree that Spengler is pretty awesome, though.
1. It's a very dumb metric, for reasons stated well downthread and for many others (the bewildering number of off-by-default hardware and kernel features many of those vulns appear in being another).
2. The fairly obvious rebuttal that things Linus says on message boards actually have little to do with the security of Linux, and that the particular thing Linus said this time has practically nothing to do with the security of Linux.
With the possible exception of OpenBSD†, nobody clueful picks server platforms other than Linux with the expectation that it is going to be easier to keep them secure on the Internet.
† Reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which OBSD is a win; in 2011, I'd rather have Spengler on my side than Theo.