"To put it simply, if I buy a car and find that the door-lock doesn't work I would demand, at least, that the lock was changed for one that worked."

"Why should we expect less from a software vendor? If they write code that doesn't work correctly (and yes that does include security, just as with a car) then they should bear the cost of fixing it."

Exactly. We shouldn't. And, look, the "IT industry" is imploding. Companies and consumers in general are starting to realize they can live without the hassle. Years of bending people over is finally catching up with our industry. Everybody is fatigued by products that just don't *work.*

Why buy more? The last ten years of shelling out money didn't produce anything but headaches.

"Also, the maintainers of thousands of software packages you refer to *are* the open-source community. You only have to look at the gnu, debian or gentoo mailing lists to see that the volunteer open-source community *does* do a lot."

That's one of the things that just *galled* me about Flynn's ignorant spew. He obviously knows *nothing* about the "community" but has an opinion anyway.

The idiotic remarks about "vendors" show how abysmally ignorant he is. Where there are "vendors" there are commercial products. And, yeah, the community isn't spending its time patching up things so corporations can make money off volunteer efforts.

Why should they? If somebody like Red Hat or Apple wants to make a profit, they damn well better fix their product. What does the community owe them? NOTHING.

Not to mention Flynn makes nothing but baseless assertions all through the article. A lot of the patches being distributed by "vendors" are coming from the community. The "vendors" just package them.

Where's Flynn's evidence for anything he claims? And what's this about muddling the issues by mixing OS X and the Finder (both proprietary) into the discussion? The community is obliged to fix Apple's mistakes in proprietary Apple products?

Flynn is just mad because he thinks somebody should give him money. Why? Because he has a cool haircut.

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/200/23930#23930