An interesting opinion from a Security Focus columnist on the topic of secure software. His basic thesis – the macho posturing of programmers who think their code in particular has no bugs, and the excessive use of low-level languages – is correct. It's really sometimes absurd with what primitive tools programs are created. And then people wonder why bugs occur that have been known for decades – well, of course tools are used that have existed just as long.
What he overlooks in his article, however, is the main motivation of many programmers in the open source area: fun. Many things come into being precisely because someone has fun doing them – but they only have fun because they use the tools of their choice.
From that perspective, we in the open source area will have to live with the fact that there are both bus drivers and fighter pilots among programmers – even if that means that parts of the system have holes from time to time. Because someone who simply enjoys C programming is not motivated by the fact that buffer overflows keep occurring to switch to Perl or Python. Even if that would eliminate entire classes of errors.
At WorldWideKlein - The Daily Durchblick I found the original article.