Are the BSDs Dying? Some Security Researchers Think So
'The BSDs have lost the battle for mindshare to Linux, and that may well bode ill for the future sustainability of the BSDs as viable, secure operating systems, writes CSO's JM Porup. The reason why is a familiar refrain: more eyeballs mean more secure code. Porup cites the work of Ilja von Sprundel, director of penetration testing at IOActive, who, noting the "small number of reported BSD kernel vulnerabilities compared to Linux," dug into BSD source code. His search 'easily' turned up about 115 kernel bugs. Porup looks at the relative security of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, the effect on Mac OS, and why, despite FreeBSD's relative popularity, OpenBSD may be the most likely to survive.' -- source: https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/18/01/26/1636229 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Sat, 27 Jan 2018 10:49:29 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'The BSDs have lost the battle for mindshare to Linux, and that may well bode ill for the future sustainability of the BSDs as viable, secure operating systems, writes CSO's JM Porup'
First of all, no open-source project can die as long as it has some kind of active community (large numbers of passive users are irrelevant for this). Having said that, I think the main reason the BSDs haven’t embraced Linux is because of their ideological allergy to the GPL. Hence their need to reinvent their own drivers for the same hardware.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann