A thread for apologies from those who said I was nuts about the NSA

[longship]

75. Your post brought a smile. Good one.

But with open source one at least has a chance to determine if there are back doors. In fact, there are often thousands of people involved with the source. Any back door is liable to be discovered.

I was a long time user of sendmail. It was my email server of choice. Yes, it could be a nightmare to set up, but once you had it up and running, it was stable, reliable, and secure. Of course this was after the Morris hack was fixed.

I do not accept your premise that open source is not more secure than closed source. One cannot know in principle whether MS Windows has any back doors since one cannot look at the source code. That alone puts its security into question. That, and the inability to find and resolve bugs, is why I switched to open source in the 90's. I have not looked back since.

Also, Linux is a helluva lot easier to administrate and everything is well documented. It's an entirely open technology with a very large community of people willing to assist with troubles.

Once I had my servers set up daily maintenance was effectively nil. They ran without a single glitch for years.