Open Source Software Security

According to the openknowledge.org Web site, “The free/open source software movement began in the 'hacker' culture of U.S. computer science laboratories (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT) in the 1960's and 1970's. The community of programmers was small, and close-knit. Code passed back and forth between the members of the community-if you made an improvement you were expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To withhold code was considered gauche-after all, you benefited from the work of your friends, you should return the favor.” The free software movement, however, was and remains inspired by the ethical ideal that software should be free and available to all, and it relies on open-source collaboration to help produce the best software possible to be distributed for free. This a bit different from the approach of the intellectual commons folks, like Apache. They saw open-sourcing as a technically superior means of creating software and other innovations, and while Apache was made available to all for free, it had no problem with commercial software being built on top of it ...»