Thanks to Richard Forno for filling in the blanks: with the kind Open Source community that we have, that hack writer article from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute was analytically ripped to pieces as soon as it was published. The author is clearly some intellectual prostitute with little to no technical background and less understanding of the Open Source movement. The Open Source movement clearly demonstrates that the best software designers on the planet do not work for Microsoft. I use Open Source software because it is good: good software saves time and money and minimizes aggravation. Poorly designed software can cost a lot of man-hours worth of maintenance and troubleshooting. Good quality saves, poor quality costs. Again, not all Open Source software is equal and I evaluate each Open Source application on its own merits before I decide to use it.

With security so uppermost and fundamental a concern in the minds of so many of us, I would find it hard to believe that Open Source software writers would not factor security in their design. I believe that the day of security-insensitive OPen Source software are over. A case in point might be Sendmail, whose poor design, cryptic configuration files, and security holes galore (until the recent past) motivated the design of solid Open Source alternatives such as Postfix, qmail,exim or Courier. In the context of the Open Source movement, the ultimate price of dissatisfaction with quality is that strong alternatives litterally rise from the ground.

The great advantage of available code for software designers of new products is that they can pore over existing source code and use those design elements that they think are best of best. This prevents or at least minimizes at least two things: (1) repetition of design and coding mistakes; (2) good design ideas get a new lease of life as they get incorporated in the new products; (3) new designs are built more quickly because the necessity to reinvent the wheel is reduced.

For existing Open Source software, the availability of the source code means that we are all working with the one and only frame of reference that matters: the source code - We are not speculating blindly in the dark as is the case with commercial software. The availability of the source code makes the process of Open Source maintenance and patching far more robust, because weak patches can be more quickly, more knowledgeably and thus more reliably diagnosed.

The availability of the source code offers the ultimate basis for cooperation - and the free and fair competition of alternative ideas and concepts. What was this shit about commonly used Open Source software being a security risk to the United States again?

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