March 28th, 2005
When will open source security grow up?
There are great open source products for nearly every purpose.
But I have yet to find many in the security field. Most seem hand-written, based on books like the O’Reilly Secure Progrmaming Cookbook.
Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. If I’m not, please point to your favorite open source security in TalkBack.
Open source should be a great model for enterprise security. Open source advocates often say bugs are dealt with faster in an open source environment, and security holes are bugs.
We also have the smug feeling that open source operating systems such as Linux are somehow more secure than Windows, thus security is a problem for the other guys.
But we have lots of open source software out there running on Windows.
There’s even a fine business model for open source security software. Under an open source license people can still pay for subscriptions to regular, automated update services.
So why is it that, when we’re looking to secure our systems — no matter the operating system — we find ourselves dealing mainly with closed source, proprietary stuff?
Or do we?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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