Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Oct 2006 21:05 UTC
Alan Cox, one of the most respected figures in the UK open source community, has warned of complacency over the security of open source projects. Speaking to delegates at London's LinuxWorld conference on Wednesday, he emphasised that considerable sums of money were being spent to try and hack into open source systems. And he cautioned that many open source projects were far from secure. "Things appear in the media like open source software is more secure, more reliable and there are less bugs. Those are very dangerous statements," Cox said. My take: Agree wholeheartedly. Security complacency, often seen in OSNews' comments sections, is very, very dangerous.
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Member since:
2006-02-17
Thom wrote ...Security complacency, often seen in OSNews' comments sections...
I'd just like to point out, the statements Mr. Cox made weren't aimed at the media or at the vast majority of osnews commentors. They were aimed at developers. An analogy would be that my theories on the cosmos' creation don't effect astronomers.
The danger isn't that writers and OSS fans say that Linux/BSD/Apache/KDE/etc. are bug free. The danger is when developers believe it. My beliefs don't effect OSS code quality because i don't release OSS code. However those belonging to people writing widgets to enhance Gnome do matter.
It's an old lesson, hubris brings ruin.