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Study Says Open Source Software a Security Risk
chareverie writes "Fortify Software released a study where they concluded that open source software poses a large security risk to corporations who have implemented it. They reason this by stating that the fault lies within the open source communities and their failure to adhere to minimum security practices. Fortify Software studied 11 open source software packages, where the application server Tomcat was determined to be the best. The other 10 were found to have poor results, with those being Derby, Geronimo, Hibernate, Hipergate, JBoss, Jonas, OFBiz, OpenCMS, Resin and Struts. Jacob West, manager of Fortify's research group, reminds that purpose of the study was 'not to condemn open source software, but rather to point out that the security practices need to improve because open source adoption by enterprises and governments is growing.'"
Check out some of the things that they're rating it on, too. A lot of their complaints and ratings come from communication and support issues, where most open source software fails. That's why there's a service industry being built up around open source software. You'll also notice that they didn't rate any software that has a big company behind it, like RHEL or MySQL or anything like that.
That being said, these are valid complaints, and if external support is going to be an issue with your company, then you need to think very carefully about whether open source software is right for you.
This study doesn't show OSS is a risk at all. They forgot to compare it with proprietary software. Without such a comparison you can't tell wether OSS is worse. For all I know 10 out of 11 proprietary software packages would have issues too.