They still seem to believe that what they did, increases the security of Linux. And comments still suggest the fix to make Linux less "open" to contributions.

They still seem to believe that what they did, increases the security of Linux. And comments still suggest the fix to make Linux less "open" to contributions. It does not seem to me that they have thought much about what they are saying. For example, in a project like Linux, there is new code, but they majority of contributions, especially small fixes (as compared to new drivers and rewrites of subsystems), are very likely bug fixes. And many bugs can intruduce security issues, too, even if that might not be obvious. Therefore, it is not clear at all that making Linux more "closed" (which seems to be the solution which the UMN people and their friends suggest) would make it any more secure. More scrutiny by top maintainers means more time is needed; needing more time means automatically less fixes can be applied, since the maintainer's time is the bottleneck; applying less fixes means more open bugs, and having more open bugs can at least easily mean to have more security issues. There are plenty of closed source projects with a security which is clearly worse than Linux. And not only that, but core Internet security infrastructure like DNS or OpenSSL is open source. The issue is rather that companies cannot be arsed to support that infrastructure they depend on. It would be interesting if the UMN people could come up with research or a hack which motivates them to change. (OTOH, one mayor windows worm per decade such as locky, wannacry, petya, tiny banker, cryptolocker, flame, and so on may be sufficient for the latter in the long run.)