Jeremy Allison goes against a Microsoft security specialist in this open source vs proprietary debate. "I believe that the open source development model does create software with significantly fewer exploitable holes than proprietary software. ... I know that programmers of proprietary . . .
Jeremy Allison goes against a Microsoft security specialist in this open source vs proprietary debate. "I believe that the open source development model does create software with significantly fewer exploitable holes than proprietary software. ... I know that programmers of proprietary software leave holes and take more liberties than open source programmers. The reasons are simple: Their management and marketing departments are screaming for the code to ship, doing it right is harder than doing it quickly and, after all, they think, who is going to know? I've been in this situation myself.

On the other hand, most open source software is written by people for whom programming is not a chore. It's a craft, and they take great pride in doing their work properly. Away from the demands of marketing and management, they are able to create the code that they want to write, not the code that will make the most money. The difference in the quality of the code produced by the two methods is staggering."

The Microsoft side counters with "Commercial software tends to be more secure than open source software, for simple economic reasons. Simply put, you get what you pay for. Commercial development organizations have a powerful motivation to get security right: Their livelihoods depend on it. That's why commercial software firms use advanced tools and follow processes that leverage knowledge of known security flaws to drive "lessons learned" into new code. Commercial software firms not only employ people who are dedicated and passionate about security, they also pay them to do the hard, tedious work - including testing - that's not especially interesting to most open source volunteers."

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