The Members Forum

Oh my God! There are security holes in Ubuntu 10.04! The sky is falling! Bill Gates is the maker of the one true operating system; forgive us Bill for we have worshiped at the feet of false Penguin idols. Oh please, give me a break!

Linux, like all other operating systems and software, has security holes. Always has, always will. No one ever said Linux was perfect. It’s not. It never will be.

What makes Ubuntu and Linux better than most of their competitors aren’t that they are flawless. It’s that when bugs are found, they fixed as fast as possible and then the fixes are pushed out to users immediately. There is no monthly Patch Tuesday. If there’s a significant problem, its tracked down and fixed. Period. End of statement.

That is after all, the whole point of open source. This specific process is called Linus’ Law by its author, Eric S. Raymond in his seminal description of open-source software development, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Formally, this “law” is that “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone,” but if you know it, you probably know it as: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

It also helps that Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. Linux is based on the design idea that it’s working on a multi-user, networked systems. From its very start, it was built to deal with a potentially hostile world. Windows wasn’t.

Windows is, yes even now, built on a single-user working on a solo machine model. In addition, Windows was designed to make it very easy for programs to trade data and instructions with each other. That’s why it’s so easy to move data from say Word to Excel and back again. The bad news is that these IPCs (interprocess communications), procedures that were never designed with security in mind.

ZDnet has the article HERE!