Re: Leaving Techwhirlers
Bugs are bugs. You can either accept the fact thatWell, if stoicism was good enough for Cicero, I suppose that some people would say it should be good enough for me.
they were found and patched, or you can B&M about
them.
But the fact remains that Microsoft has a very poor record - not in having bugs, but in its policies about them.
To start with, the company is extremely slow to admit that they exist, and discourages the publicizing of them. The argument is that admitting that the bugs exist would encourage crackers to exploit them. However, the crackers are the first to know about the bugs, and, by discouraging any publicity, Microsoft makes it harder for sysadmins to do anything about the problem.
Second, Microsoft is extremely slow to release fixes. Weeks, even months, go by before any fixes are announced, and, at times, the fixes have only been partial solutions to the problems. Meanwhile, the problems continue to be exploited by the malicious.
These behaviours are a sharp contrast to open source software, in which bugs are publicly announced as soon as they are discovered, and almost always patched within forty-eight hours. If volunteers can act this way, you have to wonder why a large software company can't. And, in fact, some proprietary companies are more open and do respond faster than Microsoft.
All in all, I think that Windows users have every right to complain about how Microsoft handles vulnerabilities. Microsoft doesn't cause the worms and viruses, but its way of handling bugs does allow them to flourish.
--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield
"Some are here working on a passage to heaven
And others they can't carry that load
A few are left singing the blues on Purgatory Road"
- Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Purgatory Road"
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