Re:Wire – Modern Communications Network
by RaleyField on Thursday December 04, 2014 @04:47AM
(#8698540)
OpenSSH or OpenSSL? I thought OpenSSH was pretty solid, forgetting the fact that configuring it isn't as straightforeward as one would hope.
Then there's another effect that I like - after the initial patch was released, the story went public, we got notified immediately, then we could discuss about what caused it and see the actual commits and who did it. Such a catastrophe can sink a company, therefore you never see such post mortems for proprietary stuff. And yes, even I as a developer cannot audit software for security, but the point is that I could hire somebody else to do that for me, like the Finnish company that discovered Heartbleed.
So yeah, there is no concrete proof that proprietary stuff is less or more secure than open source, but the point is that we'll never know, because nobody can know how secure something is without looking at the source code.