On Thu, Jun 17, 1999 at 08:02:27PM -0700, David wrote: | Diversity can certainly be thought about. The open source model encourages | program development. Many people writing differing versions of software. | Naturally this diversity means an exploit in one program is unlikely to be | found in another. This is not my experience. Different people tend to make the same mistakes in different ways. See, for example the variety of bugs that have happened when you combine web servers with NTFS (::$DATA, 'file%20', 'file.'). Diversity doesn't help here. (I know you focused on unix systems, but there was a large and diverse group who worked on the web servers that had these problems.) Also, OS diversity doesn't always help. The rlogin -froot bug occured in both AIX and linux. (I believe it was the same person who wrote the code both times) Lots of versions of dump/restore have had the same link management problems. | Encourage diversity. No one operating system should dominate. Only OS | zealots would differ with this view. Having a dominant local OS means you can hire an expert or two in that OS, rather than needing experts in three or four OSs, tracking of bug reports across each of them, etc. Lots of costs associated with this. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
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