Singing Open Source Praises
- The open and closed regions of the software world are poles apart, and not even the open source community can agree on the terminology. So, secure in the knowledge that fear, uncertainty and doubt are rife, how do you navigate the open source minefield?
Open source code generally evolves through the cooperation of a community of developers and is made available to the public, enabling anyone to make a copy, modify or redistribute it without paying royalties or licence fees. Traditionally, software vendors have distributed their products with no access to the source code, making modifications technically impossible.
Back to the future: open source everything: What is open source and how did it get here?
- Received wisdom would have it that transparency makes systems more secure by allowing anyone to view the underlying software code, identify bugs and make peer-reviewed changes.
Computer security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier certainly adheres to that theory. He’s been saying engineers should “demand open source code for anything related to security” since 1999. But not all security experts agree.
How secure is open source? Do open source systems provide a better way of preventing bugs, or are their developers just cultural elitists?
- While the “commercial” software vendors are busy spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about open source, it might be said that the world of the open source software developer is one of fearlessness, confidence and certainty. Open source developers dispense with many of the constraints placed on proprietary software developers. There’s no need for them to develop elaborate licence key checkers; maintain multiple, “crippled” demonstration versions of software or develop nifty communications protocol tricks to prevent others from creating competing software products.
“Scalability almost always kills proprietary software due to its pricing model. For example, if a commercial office package costs $300 per installation versus zero dollars for OpenOffice, choosing OpenOffice saves only $300 for a single computer — not a huge incentive. But, across a large organisation like a city council, with say 1,000 computers, you’d save $300,000 per upgrade cycle.”
Fear and loathing: is open source a developer's dream or business nightmare? Are vendors of proprietary software spreading FUD about open source?
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