vkaryl - 2:23 am on Jul 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Does the fact that Mozilla Firefox, et al are open source make it easier to find security holes in them? And if that is true, wouldn't that lead to the conclusion that more of the possible holes in Mozilla Firefox have already been found and patched?

While I have nothing definitive to add to the quoted post or to this thread, I DO have a statement (not that anyone needs to give a rat's ass....)

The one thing that's always bothered me about "open source" stuff is that you generally have NO CLUE who's providing "fixes", "extensions", "upgrades", etc. This is one of the reasons I gave up on *nix a few years back (aside from the fact that "user-friendly" was decidedly NOT EVER in its vocabulary!) - the salient fact that no matter which *nix platform you implement, eventually you will wind up with an "upgrade" which trashes everything you already have in place.... and when you address this fact with the provider of said upgrade, you will receive a polite (or not!) disclaimer that since all open source software is "use at own risk", they're very sorry you lost 100 mb of priceless information, but didn't you have backups?

Been there done exactly that. I DID have backups. But that's NOT THE POINT. The point is that in most cases MS has MORE COMPUNCTION as regards idiot users (myself included which is why I take leave to use that terminology!) than does anything "open source", nearly 100% of which is pointed toward and promulgated by programmers and their near kin.

I still say that open source OSs have some major potential.... BUT.... ONLY A PROGRAMMER COULD LOVE THEM at this point in time.

I have an EXTREMELY large correspondence on the web - approximately a thousand people worldwide on a weekly basis. Only ONE of those people uses a *nix platform - AND HE'S A PROGRAMMER! I LIKE the idea of "free to the people". But it's probably DECADES from reality.

So in the meantime, instead of everyone (naming no names, but we all know who you are, don't we?) trolling for nastiness in re MS etc, how about if we all try to figure out how to minimize the damage for the REAL world?