3 ms·
What he's really saying is not that Open Source is worse than closed source, but that Open Source is more vulnerable to hacker attacks, because malicious users
by bartl 17y ago
What he's really saying is not that Open Source is worse than closed source, but that Open Source is more vulnerable to hacker attacks, because malicious users can use the source to find security holes. Makes perfect sense to me.
- nitrogen 17y agoThis is an argument that people have been making and refuting almost since the dawn of the OSF and FSF. Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar addresses this: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-baz.... Essentially, the counterargument is that for popular projects (like the Linux kernel, Apache, etc.), the increased number of eyes on the code will catch more bugs, making up for the ability of attackers to read the code. Referring to the WordPress worm in particular, Reynolds claims (second paragraph under The Problem) that it's not WordPress's fault that its software is buggy, it's Open Source's fault. That seems like claiming that it's not Pons and Fleischmann's fault that cold fusion didn't work, it's science's fault for encouraging them to publish their results. The real problem is that people run out-of-date versions of Internet-facing software.
- joe_the_user 17y agoTake note of parent: Yes, not only is the original article wrong but it's wholly ignorant of the debate that the parent references and so doesn't advance the discussion in any meaningful way - ie, the original article is deliberate or accidental FUD.