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Re: [LUG] Heartbleed is a Free Software win

 

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:20:43PM +0100, Philip Hudson wrote:
> On 10 April 2014 11:44, Martijn Grooten <martijn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Yes. After two flipping years!
>
> Yes, yes, and Sendmail took over twenty years. So what? Although every
> point you make is valid, none of them offers any reason to believe
> closed, proprietary code does or even theoretically could do any
> better on any one of these counts.

Except that those developing proprietary code tend to have more money to
spend on audits. Even independent ones.

That's something that just happens to be, not something that makes
proprietary software inherently better. But it would have been very nice
if the article made that its main point: lessons to learn for the Free
Software movement. Now it reads like some PR department trying to turn
what may be seen as bad news into good news.

> I notice you don't address TFA's incontrovertible strong points like
> instant audit of the public record of contributions and contributors
> -- no barriers, no permissions to be requested and granted, no egos to
> be salved or territorial jurisdictions to be squabbled over, no
> ownership rights to be ceded or assigned or NDA'ed. Just the right
> questions to be asked of the right people at the earliest possible
> opportunity. Why is that?

I started my reply by saying "the article makes a number of good
points" so I didn't have to respond to his article point by point.

I do think the public record of contributions and contributors is a
strong point. Not a silver bullet: as the article says, "we can
speculate about hidden agendas behind the work in question", but I
thought it was addressed well.

Martijn.

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