Security experts find open-source flaws, Sep 23, 2003

Although Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities get most of the headlines, researchers this week identified vulnerabilities in two commonly used open-source software products.

The more serious of the vulnerabilities affects Sendmail, an open-source program for managing e-mail. The vulnerability lies in the way the e-mail server software parses e-mail headers, said Dan Ingevaldson, engineering manager for Internet Security Systems in Atlanta.

Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox ask for strict limitations to software patents in their letter to the members of the European Parliament. The vote on the Directive will be on Wednesday and it is expected to be a very close one.

Linus Torvalds comments: "The experiences from the USA demonstrate that software patents don't benefit anyone but perhaps the patent lawyers. They will just weaken the market and increase spending on patents and litigation, at the expense of technological innovation and research." He continues: "We hope that the members of European Parliament see these negative sides and don't push the same chaos to the old continent."

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community.

Linux is fundamentally more secure than Windows. There, I've said it.

It's not that Linux is some bulletproof wonder of security. It's not. If you want an operating system that really been built from the ground up to be secure what you want is OpenBSD. The crew behind it has made safe, sane security job number one before Bill Gates could spell security if you spotted him the 's' and the 'y.'

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