Perhaps not the most enforceable copyright claim

*chortle* Hey MFH -- good to

*chortle* Hey MFH -- good to see you. (I've been scarce in the Usual Net Haunts, yes.) That argument never made a bit of sense to me, jsut as the claim that closed-source is somehow safer... ugh, bad thinking. Not that security lacks a large contingent of folk who honestly believe that ignorance is bliss, but...

Heh... I couldn't code my

Heh... I couldn't code my way out of a wet paper bag using BASIC, but even i can see that closed source is only "safer" in the sense of security through obscurity... a very thin layer of protection.

Open source OTOH is only unsafe if too few people are poking around in the code, and too high a percentage of them are hostile. If a hostile finds a potential vulnerability in open source code first and comes up with an exploit before anyone who isn't hostile notices... users are potentially screwed.

But this also seems unlikely to me, as most such open source tools that have a narrow field of people using poking around in them also seem to have a small enough user base not to be worth exploiting.

And even in a worst case scenario, an open source tool that is wildly popular with non-technical users, but that is so unsexy that only the project maintainers and a few outside hostiles bother to read the code, the attackers would have to be both smarter than the maintainers AND subtle enough for the exploit to go unnoticed.

It could happen... I don't recall ever hearing of it happening, but it could.

Proprietary code, with only people paid who are to check it, and no hobbyists allowed... this sort of thing happens constantly.

MS and Apple intentionally CREATE for themselves the sort of situation that would make the perfect storm for FOSS... and the lack of available source is only a minor stumbling block.

And now the folks creating the tools to attack those closed source juggernauts are trying to follow the same business model that allows them to perform their attacks... delicious eh?