Slashdot Mirror
UK Conservatives Slammed Over Open Source Stance
Golygydd Max writes "The UK government has been criticised by the opposition Conservative (Tory) party for its lack of support for open-source software. Now, according to Techworld, a security company that has examined the Tory plans has come out against the use of open source software, citing the number of security problems inherent in the software. This is a sensitive issue for the UK government, still smarting from the loss of 7m family records from HM Revenue and Customs in 2007. What makes this criticism interesting is that this is an attack on the policies of what will certainly be the next British government — it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office. It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election."
We should collect statistics here and convince these Britons that OSS is still the best model around.
Yeah, maybe we look here https://opensource.fortify.com/ They scanned 103 projects with a total of 24668646 loc and found a total of 403 error which makes for 1 error in 61212 loc or 4 errors per projects. Not too bad I'd say. Oh, btw of those 403 errors found 383 are already fixed.
The "press release" by Fortify for this claims that Larry Suto performed the test. He has a reputation for faulty, perhaps even fraudulent, testing methods. He also only tested 11 specific Java apps (and Fortify sells "audited" versions of those apps). The tests were performed using Fortify's software, no other testing software was used. So the accuracy of this test relies on the accuracy of Fortify's software, which hasn't been independently tested as far as I can tell. The press release also mentions findings by the Forrester Group, who are well known for a history of spreading inaccurate FUD about non-MS software.
Open Source for Open Minds
We can also look here http://www.fortify.com/partners/technologyPartners.jsp and note that Microsoft is one of their partners.