LinuxJournal: Nimda, Other Worms and Life on the Internet
Sep 21, 2001, 22:34 (4 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Phil Hughes)
"...The other reason Linux, Apache and *BSD have a big
advantage is the code is open for peer review. While the marketing
departments of large proprietary software companies keeps telling
the world that this is bad because a potential cracker can see how
to break the code, the reality is that pride of ownership seems to
far outweigh this potential problem.
What do I mean by pride of ownership? Individual programmers
care that their code works. They view a bug report as positive;
someone took the time to find a problem and let them know about it.
I remember, for example, finding what I thought was a bug in the
serial driver in Linux back in 1993. While I used to be a
professional software tester before I got into publishing, I still
somewhat sheepishly sent e-mail to Ted T'so suggesting that I might
have found a problem. Ted's response was to send me a patch to try
(which worked).
On the other end of the spectrum, I was told by the employee of
what was a large proprietary software vendor that they had an
internal bug list, but they wouldn't disclose its content. When
someone reported a bug they would deny it was on the list, but
increment the count of that bug on the internal list."
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