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The US Government and Open Standards: a Tale of Personal Woe (thevarguy.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This article details a Linux user's struggles to submit a grant application when the process requires finicky, proprietary software. It also covers familiar ground made timely by the upcoming elections: the U.S. should prefer open source software and open standards over proprietary alternatives. The grant application required a PDF created by Adobe Acrobat — software Adobe no longer supports for Linux. Once the document was created, attempting to submit it while using Ubuntu fails silently. (On Windows 7, it worked immediately.) The reader argues, "By requiring Acrobat the government gives preference to a particular software vendor, assuring that thousands of people who otherwise would not choose to use Adobe software are forced to install it. Worse, endorsing a proprietary, narrowly supported technology for government data poses the risk that public information could become inaccessible if the vendor decides to stop supporting the software. Last but not least, there are privacy and fairness issues at stake. Acrobat is a totally closed-source program, which means we have to take Adobe's word for it that nothing sketchy is going on in its code. ... It would seem to be in the interest of the public for the government to prefer an open source solution, since it is much harder to hide nefarious features inside code that can be publicly inspected."
since it is much harder to hide nefarious features inside code that can be publicly inspected
Not THAT crap again.
Heartbleed should put that right to bed.
I don't understand your point here. It was found and then fixed in a few days, and the patches were widely released to anyone willing to update. The system worked exactly like it was supposed to: the fact that a single critical bug garned that much attention should give you an idea of how uncommon it is.
In contrast, Adobe Reader has had not one, not two, but 26 different cripplingly severe vulnerabilities in the last six months alone, and that's only because I got tired of counting after #26. How many people patch Adobe Reader? Would you like to compare Libreoffice to Microsoft Word, FreeBSD to Windows, or Internet Explorer to Firefox? Maybe Apache to IIS, or perhaps OpenJDK to Sun java? Amarok to Itunes? Our very own Adobe Reader to Okular or Evince?
Open source software does indeed have a demonstrably better security record than closed source software, that is undeniable. Further more, even if it didn't, it wouldn't matter because the statement was that it was easier to discover vulnerabilities in open wource software. And he's right. What do you rather do: read source code, or dissassemble a binary?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
... Is the worst program to use to create PDFs. Just use one of the free applications.
PDF is the open standard for sharing documents. Adobe does not offer any open source or free creation tools, but there are half a dozen great PDF creation tools available some of them open source, many of them free.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
To add to this: why the hell does it even matter if one particular software solution contained a serious security issue? The whole point of having open standards is the ability to have multiple software solutions all capable of interoperably working on the same data formats. This is one area where HTML shines, though HTML isn't quite well suited for physical paper print material though.