Clearly, it's difficult to trust the integrity of Microsoft's products. Microsoft's customers should demand that the company release the source code of its programs and operating systems so they can be publicly reviewed and audited for security. The open source development model has proven to be a boon for a wide variety of development efforts, including the very popular Linux operating system, the Apache web server software, and Netscape Navigator. The basic idea behind open source is very simple. When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves.
People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs.
And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. We in the open-source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits. One role model for Microsoft is OpenBSD, a Unix operating system that's been open sourced and ruthlessly audited for bugs in general and security vulnerabilities in particular. OpenBSD is volunteer-run project that's serious about security. We have been auditing since the summer of 1996.