News: Open, closed source security about equal?
"Other things being equal, we expect that open and closed systems will exhibit similar growth in reliability and in security assurance," Anderson wrote in his paper.

The research is unlikely to quell the long-running debate between proponents of open-source software and corporations that believe closed-source software is better. While providing ammunition for each side's arguments, the paper also undermines each coalition. Supporters in the Linux community have maintained that open-source programs are more secure, while Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows, Jim Allchin, argued in court that opening up Windows code would undermine security.

"The more creators of viruses know about how antivirus mechanisms in Windows operating systems work, the easier it will be to create viruses or disable or destroy those mechanisms," Allchin testified in May.

Anderson rebuts those types of arguments in his paper.

Idealizing the problem, the researcher defines open-source programs as software in which the bugs are easy to find and closed-source programs as software where the bugs are harder to find. By calculating the average time before a program will fail in each case, he asserts that in the abstract case, both types of programs have the same security.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-938229.html