IS MICROSOFT really changing? Is Microsoft finally accepting that "open source" (as it insists on calling it) is acceptable? Hell no.

But closed source remains a sort of state religion at Microsoft, as I learned this week from Fred Trotter, an expert in open source medical software.

Fred wrote this week about some FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) Shawn Hernan of Microsoft is spreading within the security community — that open source is less secure despite its being visible.

“[S]ince 2007, 5 major maintainers on Ubuntu are linked to Novell [...] Mostly the one maintaining .NET packages.”
      --OiaohmNeedless to say, this is only affecting Windows and Microsoft's utter negligence [1, 2, 3] contributes to it. The last thing we need is for GNU/Linux to inherit the same security problems through Mono and Moonlight. In today's IRC conversations (the relevant part starts here), it came up that "since 2007, 5 major maintainers on Ubuntu are linked to Novell [...] Mostly the one maintaining .NET packages." That's a claim from Oiaohm, who added: "Matt Asay will allow .NET to infect more. Then end of next year MS can drop the patent wall on them." Maybe this is a good opportunity to ask Asay some questions in Slashdot. Well, Slashdot treats him like a celebrity and some months ago he was mentioned in their front page because former Microsoft employees voted him one of the "most influential in FOSS" (no coders at all were seen as worthy for this list, not even Richard Stallman). But then again, as the new call for questions states, "Matt [Asay] is on the board of advisors for Slashdot's parent company, Geeknet." We previously complained about Slashdot's new Microsoft slant [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], not to mention the hiring of former Microsoft employees who can change the agenda and groom particular people who are helpful to them (Matt Asay is the one who brought Microsoft to OSBC [1, 2, 3]). MinceR says that "Geeknet is completely corrupted". Why is it that Slashdot picks questions for Jim Zemlin, for example (he is a marketing person from the Linux Foundation), whereas technical people from the heavily-disrespected GNU receive no opportunity to offer their side of the story? Slashdot reached out in the same way to some Microsoft employees.

DaemonFC, a former Microsoft MVP, says: "I still don't get why many large companies with lots of lawyers don't flinch at shipping Mono if it really is so bad... you'd think they'd clear something like that with their legal dept first..."

MinceR says that Microsoft "does everything they can to make the legal situation about mono-related patents as unclear as possible" and Oiaohm tells DaemonFC that Intel and other companies do know about the problem, which is why they stay out of Moonlight, for example [1, 2]. "Intel will not touch it," Oiaohm insists, "due to legal issues."

MinceR adds: "we see canonical pushing mono... if their legal department didn't warn them about this, when exactly will they do so?"

At a later stage in the day, Oiaohm dropped this interesting new link ("2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors"). "Good read for those who think languages like .net are majorally more secure," he said. "That is the new list for bugs that common breached systems last year. Lot of them don't link to what .net and java languages protect against. To be correct php and other equal languages have been breached." ⬆

"The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supports software reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team."

--CIO David Wennergren, Department of Defense (October 2009)