There’s a good article on LinuxWorld about the security debate between open-source and Windows. My first question is, does it need to be a debate? In this day and age, isn’t it easy enough to quantify vulnerabilities?
If you are looking for subjective opinion, I recommend looking through the interviews we’ve done here. At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fan-boy, the Microsoft interviews (in my opinion) demonstrate a company where secure coding is “in the water”. Code goes through threat modeling, risky function calls have simply been banned, code goes through automated and human inspection, and vulnerabilities that do slip through feedback into the process to determine how to prevent them in the future.
I simply don’t get the same feeling from the open-source people we’ve talked to. When we’ve brought the subject up, the response is almost universally “many eyeballs,” and faith (without data) that “many eyeballs” is effective.
Am I completely off base? Do things like the Linux kernel and Apache go through rigorous security reviews? Is there proof that “many eyeballs” in open source is at least as good as something like the Security Development Lifecycle in Microsoft? If you’re in a position to know, let’s chat!
