Popular open source projects such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, Tcl dynamic languages, and Amanda were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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Jaws
4 years 19 weeks 4 days 16 hours ago
Great Article
I think this is a great article and serves to expose, unlike commercial software, the way open source reacts to and fixes security concerns.
I wonder if you guys that voted this story down even read the article! I doubt it or you actually think this story is unimportant or irrelevant to the community .
The firm Coverity, hired by Homeland Security, is actually helping identify security exposures and the open source community is fixing them, to quote the article:
... A total of 7,826 open source project defects have been fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006...
... Some open source projects have been quicker to respond to the Coverity scan results than others, noted Maxwell. About 116 of 180 projects being reviewed are making use of the Prevent SQS scans and eliminating the bugs...
If that's not helpful to the community, I don't know what is.