“Recently, several outlets picked up the story that there were
hundreds of security flaws in the Android Linux kernel, with 88 of
them classified as “severe†– but
that wasn’t a surprise to me. All code has
flaws and errors. What surprised me were the responses I read in
the forums.“Of course, Apple and Windows users were all over the fact that
Android has 88 severe security flaws that have just been publicly
revealed and remain unfixed. But the Linux faithful, as they so
frequently do, left me just shaking my head and wondering how
people can become so disconnected from logic and reality in blind
devotion to their favorite OS or kernel.“In this case, the arguments centered around the
“many eyes†versus
“security through obscurity†models
of security. Those who defended Linux pointed out that the issues
were disclosed, which illustrated the superiority of the
“many eyes†approach to kernel
patching. They further argued that while iOS, OS X, and Windows 7 /
Win 7 mobile certainly have countless security flaws – many of them
severe – we can’t compare them to Linux,
because those platforms are closed-source and no one knows the
total number.”