I've got some different take-a-ways. First, time-to-discovery is different from the shallowness of the bug. Increasing the number of eyeballs looking at the c

I've got some different take-a-ways. First, time-to-discovery is different from the shallowness of the bug. Increasing the number of eyeballs looking at the code increases the likelihood that: a) someone will encounter the problem. b) that someone will be interested enough to dig into it. c) they will then find the problem before giving up. That's the power of many eyeballs. It's an expression of interest. With fewer eyeballs, you might get bug reports (a), but not have enough people looking to get (b+c) out of the community. With closed source, (b+c) can _only_ be provided by the team. Open Source means that this can be provided by a sufficiently large community. That open source projects are having security bugs reported can probably be explained by economics. It's becoming harder to find security problems in closed source projects (windows), so researchers shift to open source ones. With an open source project, there's a lot of low hanging fruit to be had with static analysis, copied code and fuzzing. Closed source is a lot harder, so people go for where the ROI is good - either towards the rewards or towards open source for practice. Finally, shifting to Java just shifts the attack to the JVM, which is just as hard to secure. I still remember the year of Java exploits, complete with a remote DoS attack based around sending a floating point number to the server[1]. There will always be bugs. If your goal is to write secure software, open source is good. If your goal is to avoid bad press, making it expensive to test is probably the way to go instead. [1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alert-cve-2010-4476-305811.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alert-cve-...