From: Thees Peereboom 

Geo,

>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.

So, in your perception it has been hackfree and thus 'safe' for 5 years, right?

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

If it's the same, OSS at least is free.

>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.

Yes, but the user could choose to continue with his current version and
choose his own development path. Something you can't 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.

Since you have access to the sources and the right to modify, you could
always hire a programmer - no need to be one yourself.

- Thees Peereboom

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