Cuba Switching to Open Source Software
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 17 Feb 2007 | Tagged as: General
It seems like a trendy thing to do these days. Drop Windows and switch to Linux. Asian nations are trying to switch to open source, and so are China, Brazil, and Norway. Now Cuba is trying to drop proprietary software.
Cuba wants to switch away from Windows because they don’t trust Microsoft and the U.S. government. They think its safer using open source operating sytems like Linux.
Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation) created the license that many open source applications use. He claims that “a private program is never trustworthy”. Proprietary software can have backdoors which can compromise a user’s security. This is a typical scare tactic used against commercial software.
If a back door is written into a program, there is always the possibility of it’s presence being revealed by employees who leave the company. Software engineers tend to switch companies frequently. We also have the option to examine the software at the assembly language level. There are many disassemblers out there which can be used to find out if we’re being spied on.
I think open source is less secure than proprietary software. The reason for this is that the source code is available and nicely documented. Its easy to go in and make a back door yourself and redistribute the application. How many open source software users compile their own applications from the original source code? Most use binaries they pick up from various sources. Proprietary software is less likely to have a back door because the companies who create them want to make money and do not want their reputations tarnished.
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