Irony at its best we have again outdone ourselves. If hacking and copyright violations were not enough now we face with another problem of open and closed source software. In a now age old battle between open and closed source battle between open and closed source operation systems and applications.
Can either of them really be considered more secure then the other? Open source* (or free software**) and close source*** (or proprietary software) are two approaches to the development, control and commercialization of computer software. Open source approaches differ from the proprietary model of software licensing by allowing other individuals and organizations to view, modify and redistribute the source code.
Now we shall list the facts down, without holding any prejudice to one or the other.
The biggest downside of closed source software is that you have no idea of how it was made. You must accept the word of the vendor for the quality of his own product. Large commercial vendors have the resources to create quality assurance processes that include strict guidelines for programmers combined with design and code reviews to avoid security and reliability flaws from sneaking in. this is very expensive and may postpone the release of new products by week or even months. It is cheaper to spend 200 hours fixing security and reliability problem found by costumers than months fixing poor code which may or may not be a problem. It takes very advance reverse engineering and assembly language skills to fix closed source software and often the license prohibits you from modifying the product.
The biggest downside of open source software is all clueless fanatics supporting the cause; the up side is if you have the skill and time, you can have an excellent view in working of each and every application. With the correct knowledge, it becomes trivial to use information for evil purposes and with the correct knowledge it trivial to fix these problems. The fact that source code is available for anyone to review does not instantaneously make the software free of design and implementation problems. If someone with required knowledge sits down and reviews the product and feeds corrections back to the maintainer it can surely help.
When security problems are found in open source software, the fixes are available in a matter of hours. A typical example, Linux and Windows differ in philosophy, cost and ease of use, versatility, and stability with each setting to improve in their perceived working areas. Typically, some major areas of perceived weakness regularly cited have include the poor “out of box” usability of Linux desktop for mass market and poor system stabilities of Windows.
The GNU and BSD projects have code reviews in varying degrees, of which openBSD is probably is most well know and their efforts have paid off. Our focus should be on the aspects you can verify such as quality of design and implementation, support-for free or for a fee, and their capability to fix problems.
*open source: software or application which provides a view of source code and may also allow editing thus allowing the user to modify the product for his purpose.
**free software does not mean free of cost but free of source code manipulation license violations.
***closed source: source code cannot be vied of edited by the user.
SUPPORTING CLOSE SOURCE: Close source technology is helpful where the user is non-programmer does not want any coding error to occur. Such type of technology is required in real time processing such as banking, air traffic control, data resource, etc. where data security and reliability is then main need. Any error in the software can highly cost the company. E.g.: windows, media player etc.
SUPPORTING OPEN SOURCE :Here a choice is given to the user to avail the software solution service or not if the user is ale enough he can himself modify the software for his own purpose as the source code is provided. E.g.: Linux, open Solaris etc.
