Symantec do say, in their recently released Threat Report, that the Mozilla family of browsers had a higher number of vulnerabilities, in the first six months of 2005, than Internet Explorer – andthat a higher percentage of these were high-severity. So much for Mozilla and its supposedly ‘safe’ browsers.
What is clear is that there is more hype and spin around open source than many would like to admit. What isn’t clear is the extent to which it’s motivated by the software community’s jealousy of Bill Gates. I wonder if Mozilla’s failure is a leading indicator for the failure of the wider open source movement as well? If it is, there are significant governance and security implications for all organizations that have deployed open source software – as well, obviously, for anyone who has a financial stake in an open source-dependent operation of any sort.
