Open Source Buggier Than Microsoft

Danish computer security firm Secunia reports their findings that over the course of 2007, open source projects such as Red Hat Linux and Mozilla's Firefox browser have had significantly more bugs than all of Microsoft's products put together.

The most consistently erroneous software distributor was Computer Associates, according to Secunia. Following them, but with significantly less vulnerabilities in their software, was Symantec. The high figures for Computer Associates and Symantec were partly due to their wide range of products.

Leading the pack in vulnerabilities in operating systems was Red Hat, with a reported 633 bugs. Solaris (252), Mac OS X (235), and Windows (123) followed, in their respective orders. The large number of vulnerabilities found in open source operating systems can be attributed to their wide usage of third party components. With two different browsers and graphic interfaces, a number of PDF readers and image editors, Red Hat and other operating systems are made to include and support a large number of third party components.

In browsers, Firefox led with 64 bugs, compared to 43 for Internet Explorer. Opera and Safari each had 14 bugs reported. Secunia admits, however, that "zero-day" security bugs in Firefox were addressed far more quickly than those found in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Of eight zero-day bugs found in Firefox in 2007, five were patched, three in just over a week. Out of 10 Internet Explorer zero-days, only three have been patched at all, and the shortest patch time on one of those was 85 days.

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