Fergie's Tech Blog

Trend Micro: Open Source is More Secure

[Full Disclosure: Trend is my employer.]

Tom Espiner writes on C|Net News:

Antivirus vendor Trend Micro is claiming that open-source software is inherently more secure than proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows.

Trend said one reason open-source software has fewer security issues is the variety of Linux distributions. Although they use the same kernel, if one distribution is compromised, the same piece of malicious software may not work on a different distribution, the company said Monday.

"Open source is more secure. Period," Raimund Genes, chief technical officer for anti-malware at Trend, said. "More people control the code base; they can react immediately to vulnerabilities; and open source doesn't have so much of a problem with legacy code because of the number of distributions."

Genes said open-source developers "openly talk about security," so patches are "immediate--as soon as something happens," whereas proprietary vendors with closed code have to rely purely on their own resources to push patches out.

posted by Fergie @ 6/15/2006 11:23:00 AM