Business Success with Open Source

More Secure Solutions

As you learned in the last section, there’s no such thing as a finished piece of modern software. Similarly, there’s also no such thing as a bug-free piece of modern software, and some of those bugs are security vulnerabilities. This holds true for all types of software, proprietary or FOSS.

The perception of FOSS as inherently insecure is a grizzled and tired myth. For decades people faced with using software created under the open development model have resisted with largely unsubstantiated claims about poor security. We can trace some of this reaction back to NIH syndrome (“if it wasn’t built here, it’s no good”), but a lot of it goes back to the age-old human fear of the new and unfamiliar—software xenophobia, if you ...