The biggest threat to open source in 2009

Security and updates, which are often the same thing.

There is no longer any doubt that hackers and malware writers are going after open source projects as they once went after Windows. Vulnerabilities are being found, discovered, created, exchanged.

The best protection against vulnerabilities is to keep software updated, but most open source lacks update services. That’s one part of the Windows license that is worth paying for, and there does not seem to be an open source equivalent.

An exception is Firefox (above, from SecurityMike). But how many take advantage of this? And how tied is Firefox to updating for security purposes? Remember we’re talking about pushing updates, not asking users to pull them.

In any case, the enterprise market is more important here. Servers hold more secrets than clients.

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