“Mozilla pays bug hunter $2,500 for Firefox flaw finds” is supposed to make any Firefox user feel happy? There’s an implicit admission that Mozilla can’t find the flaws itself – and an equally implicit recognition that the great open source model ain’t so hot. It’s not hard to imagine an enterprising bug hunter identifying flaws that Mozilla doesn’t want to pay for, and then blackmailing Mozilla….
It’s equally not hard to imagine Mozilla being overloaded with bug claims…at $500 a go, it’s worth trying to find some! And then how quickly will Mozilla fix them? And what’s the liklihood of someone else exploiting some of the identified flaws in the time during which Mozilla is fixing them?
We can certainly do with improvements to Internet Explorer – but let’s not pretend that Mozilla’s Firefox is the “safe alternative” – it’s a bit like claiming that Iraq today is a democracy.
