Has security become a non-issue for enterprise Open Source?

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Echoing the comments of Kaspersky’s Golovanov, Schneier argues that Open Source code often undergoes a far more rigorous evaluation process than proprietary vendors can afford.

Proper evaluation requires the time and expertise of security experts evaluating a piece of code multiple times and from different angles, said Schneier, who is a globally-recognised security technologist and author.

“It's possible to hire this kind of expertise, but it is much cheaper and more effective to let the community at large do this,” he pointed out. “And the best way to make that happen is to publish the source code.”

“There's no reason to believe that open source code is, at the time of its writing, more secure than proprietary code,” he said.

“A two-year-old piece of open source code is likely to have far fewer security flaws than proprietary code, simply because so many of them have been found and fixed over that time.”

But if the industry consensus is that Open Source software is, in fact, secure, then why do public security concerns still exist?

Mani Padisetti, who is the Chief Operating Officer and Director of Open Source services and support provider Digital Armour, pointed a finger of blame at ‘smaller proprietary software manufacturers’ who he expects to be intimidated by the Open Source licensing model.

“There are bigger vendors like Microsoft who are okay with Open Source, but there are also some smaller proprietary software manufacturers that still have the concern that Open Source will kill them, and they don’t want there to be any uptake of Open Source at all,” he said.

"I’ve sat in on a number of meetings where proprietary vendors have said that Open Source is unsupported freeware and not secure, and that’s just not true,” he said.

Digital Armour was founded in 2000 as a Sydney-based IT support and service consultancy that catered to the SME market.

Two years into its business, Digital Armour decided to focus primarily on Open Source systems to better suit customer demands.

‘We have sold support primarily for Open Source systems and have also sold applications that are commercial Open Source,” Padisetti said, adding that Open Source systems often have technological benefits for specific requirements.

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