From: "Geo." 

"Thees Peereboom"  wrote in message
news:7vsouuctcv2cefgm6g9rib6fjc1f76agf0{at}4ax.com...

> A hack is a matter of time - I agree. As long as the period between
> release and hack is long enough, you could call it secure, right?

I don't know if I'd agree with that or not. Over the past 5 years NTmail
has been real secure as a mail server, but over the past 3 weeks we
discovered a new way to hack at it and so far we have come up with 4
exploits in 3 weeks. Was it secure before, hmmm, the hacks affect old
versions too so they were always there but nobody had thought to try what
we are trying now.

> To sell? To whom? Doncha know - software is *preloaded* these days,
> that's everybody's using MS Office.

If it's preloaded, how come so many companies use ghost or drive image?

> Exactly, neither do I. So why would OS with its full disclosure be
> worse than any 'named' software?

I don't think it's any worse, I just don't think it's any better either.

> Yes and again; isn't this in favor of OS? Since OS isn't owned by a
> vendor, it hardly can be sold, right?

Wrong, just because it's open source doesn't mean someone doesn't own it.
True a buyer couldn't remove the source code from distribution however by
buying the product from the maintainer they most certainly could change the
development direction.

> With OS software at least you know you won't get sold and you have at
> least as much influence to the product as with named software.

I don't believe that to be true, I gave you an example of Klaus selling the
Knoppix distro to AOL, AOL could then make changes to the defaults so that
they were the default homepage, etc. If you want the current distribution
you have to accept whatever changes they've made to it or you have to start
a branch of your own. If you aren't a programmer then you are in pretty
much the same position you would be if you used closed source software.

Geo.

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