Tories ignore security risk

The British conservative party was wrong to slate the UK government for its approach to open source, and US outfit Fortify Software has come up with research to prove it, according to NetworkWorld.

According to Fortify, comments made by Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne on the government's alleged failure to embrace open source, ignore the hidden problems underlying its model of software creation.

"Our own research, however, has concluded that open source software exposes users to significant and unnecessary business risk, as the security is often overlooked, making users more vulnerable to security breaches," says Fortify VP Richard Kirk.

The words 'danger' and 'Microsoft' seem to fit together a lot better than 'Microsoft' and 'open source' but, believe it or not, the former seems to be causing the latter to occur, reports The Inquirer.

Danger, a mobile software and services outfit snapped up by the Vole last year, is purportedly looking for NetBSD developers to work on its Sidekick mobile phone.

NetBSD is an open source OS that works on a plethora of devices from computers to mobiles. Danger's current OS and apps work with back-end servers to offer services like Internet access, instant messaging and games.

When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?" LinuxWorld reports.

"I was pretty familiar with payment systems and global trading systems, but I just scratched my head when I came here," Thompson says.

With his history of working on IBM mainframes and large Sun Solaris systems, the PayPal approach to computing seemed alien, especially for a company which core mission was dealing with money.