There is something missing in the mix
Recent news that the Unreal IRC server download has been infected with malware for some eight months is showing up a few of the problems with the structure of the Open Sauce community. The news follows on the heels of a story about how a Trojan horse made its way into the Gentoo distro.
The distro system is brilliant, but unfortunately it assumes that hackers will never be nasty enough to attack it. Compared to Windows, Linux is safer for those who want to avoid being hacked. But it seems that the Linux community is getting too cocky for its own good.
Allowing infected code to make its way into an official distro or not even sweeping a server for malware is really dumb. Businesses looking to Linux to provide them with safe solutions should be wondering if they are going to infect their networks because some weirdie beardie Open Source geek believes Linux is invulnerable.
It isn't and if the Open Source community is going to be taken seriously then it has to pull its socks up. Eight months with malware on a server is shoddy practice even if the operating system was bullet proof.
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Nick Farell
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