Kuo, Jimmy wrote:
>Is there any study that shows that using Open Source results in savings?
>
It is an issue with a lot of moneyed axes to grind, and therefore you
can find studies supporting whatever position you desire to take. You
might as well ask for studies supporting the (non)existance of God; the
results will be about as passionate, and about as useful.
Caveat: I have strong views on both the open source and God issues, but
to keep it topical to the CRIME list, y'all are just going to have to
guess/google what those views might be :)
More topical to the CRIME list is my favorite open source quality study:
Miller, B.P., Fredrikson, L., and So, B., An Empirical Study of the
Reliability of UNIX Utilities. Communications of the ACM 33, 12
(December 1990), 32-44. Also appears in German translation as Fatale
Fehlerträchtigkeit: Eine Eimpirische Studie zur Zuverlassigkeit von
UNIX-Utilties, iX (March 1991).
ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical_papers/fuzz.pdf.
The interesting result was that GNU utilities failed *far* less often
(and thus were less vulnerable) than comparable commercial UNIX utilities.
This 1991 study was followed up in 2000 *Fuzz* Revisited: A
Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX *...*
<http://opensource.asti.dost.gov.ph/advocacy/fuzz-revisited.pdf> The
follow-on study found a similar result: an over-all very poor
vulnerability rate, but that the GNU and Linux programs were
significantly more secure than the commercial programs.
So on the broad TCO question, who knows. But on the narrower software
security question, open source consistently wins.
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/
Chief Scientist, Immunix http://immunix.com
http://www.immunix.com/shop/
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