The only reason everyone goes for Bill Gates (apart from he’s got the money) is that there’s only one of him. It’s long been fashionable to moan to about Windows, and to point the finger at its (multiple) vulnerabilities. As though any product that doesn’t sit on almost every desktop isn’t going to be attacked – a lot.
Now that Unix/Linux solutions are moving from fringe show to minority competitor, they’re beginning to be worth attacking. And guess what?
Open source also has holes. Open source isn’t, after all, a golden bullet – a bit more like a bullet in the foot. With Bill Gates, you just have to moan until the patch is released and then get it installed – and then most of the world is safe – but if a vulnerability is found in an open source product – and more and more are – then you have to wait for multiple vendors to release their own individual open source patches – and they take different amounts of time, and they do the job differently (or indifferently) well – and maybe you get safe. And maybe not. And open source products come, and go, and so no-one really gets to have much of a profile – which means no-one ever really gets round to whining at them.
I’d rather have a software supplier who sorts the problem out, in one hit, across the world. Anytime.
