[ILUG] Interesting article

[PJ Wall]

> PJ Wall wrote:
>
>> 1.  its better that OSS stays "by geeks, for geeks" and does not grow
>>  its current market share... OSS products like Firefox are in my
>> opinion, genuinely better and more stable that comparable closed
>> source proprietary equivalents.  However, the more popular these OS
>> products become, the more people will be interested in seeking out
>> security weaknesses.  Firefox is currently relitavely spyware and
>> pop-up free, but this will change once it gains market share.
>
> fuzzix wrote:

> And this is a problem why? Firefox is in active development so any vulns
> which are discovered will most likely be quashed fairly quickly. In
> fact, people are actively encouraged to seek out and report
> vulnerabilities... One I'm hoping gets seen to soon is the popup
> workaround that some fabbotastic, trustworthy sites are using - I'm so
> grateful to advertisers for circumventing my methods for blocking their
> intrusive garbage!


This is an interesting point... I have been thinking about this 
recently.  I remember having an argument about this very point a few 
months ago with a sysadmin in a fairly big Dublin city center Org.  I 
was saying roughly what you are saying Fuzzix, but he was saying that 
Firefox will have its security vunerabilities exposed once it is worth 
the trouble to expose them... i.e. when market share grows.  Firefox is 
pop-up free now only because MS IE is dominant and full of security 
holes.  My sysadmin friend said that no matter what the OSS community 
do, the people trying to compromise Firefox will win... all they have to 
do is turn their attention to Firefox.

I just want to say that I totally disagree with this, but it is worth 
mentioning here because I believe there is a lot of people out there 
thinking like my sysadmin friend.