From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Aug 12 21:21:22 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from copland.udel.edu (copland.udel.edu [128.175.13.92]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 88E9537BDC5 for ; Sat, 12 Aug 2000 21:21:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from papalia@UDel.Edu) Received: from copland.udel.edu (copland.udel.edu [128.175.13.92]) by copland.udel.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id AAA25136; Sun, 13 Aug 2000 00:21:12 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 00:21:12 -0400 (EDT) From: John To: Christian Jacken Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How safe is FreeBSD? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > sometimes Microsoft supporters get me in serious trouble when it comes to > the questions "how should we trust our main operations to an operating > system made a buch of open source programmers" and "you say that Microsoft > or NSI possibly have a backdoor to Windows2000, but how can we be sure that > there is no backdoor in Red Hat or FreeBSD"? no matter what responses you get, ultimately there really is no great answer... The 'quick and easy' response to their statement would be: "there's no guarantees in life about anything, however at least with an Open Source OS you have the choice and chance to see if there is a backdoor, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there actually looking for them and 'keeping score'. Microsoft or similar entities never even offer you the opportunity to see the code, so you are lacking the ability to prove your fears right or wrong." Hope that makes sense and helps a little bit... You might want to move this to -advocacy instead, since it seems more appropriate to there.. --john To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message