Lindows sells virus protection
Posted Feb 20, 2003 15:01 UTC (Thu) by
martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
Parent article:
Lindows sells virus protection
I think that a point about open source software and viruses is being overlooked.
As far as I understand it, a virus can only taking advantage of a weakness in a
system, i.e. a misconfiguration, a bad design, or a bug. If you control the source,
you can control any fixes to such weaknesses, thus there is no need for
anti-virus software. Why would anyone create software to detect a program
which will take advantage a known weakness instead of simply fixing the
weakness? (Unless, of course, you are running proprietary software and you
cannot fix the weakness) So either Lindows is realeasing software with known
weaknesses (thus justifying the anti-virus software) or the anti-virus software
must be bogus, what could it be looking for? (As others pointed out already, this
is all mute if we are talking about anti-virus software for non-Lindows systems.)
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