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First off, some important housekeeping. If you’re reading this with Internet Explorer, and you haven’t patched your browser, do it right now. At six o’clock last night Microsoft released an emergency patch for the browser to plug a hole that allowed hackers to use compromised websites to steal passwords and other sensitive data. That Microsoft chose to release the patch ‘out of band’ gives some indication of the seriousness of the flaw. It is estimated that 10,000 websites have been compromised by hackers to take advantage of the hole in the few days since it was announced. It is likely that Explorer was targeted largely because it is the most widely-used browser out there. But the fiasco raises questions about whether internet-connected software such as a web browser might benefit from the ‘crowdsourcing’ approach pioneered by the likes of Google in its Android mobile operating system. A Google spokesman recently summed up the company’s approach to Android thus: “There will always be smarter people outside Google than inside.” Whilst Android certainly isn’t the first open source platform, Google’s approach differs from the likes of Mozilla and Linux in a number of ways. Firstly, they offered cash incentives to developers to come up with features for the OS: 2,000 people submitted features, and the best shared a $10m prize pot. Secondly, the project wasn’t always open-source. Google initially set a team of developers working on the project in a closed environment, and only released the code tree to the world when it was “stable enough”, in the words of Andy Rubin, the engineering director in charge of the Android project. Microsoft has dipped a toe into the open source model – or “shared source”, as it prefers to call it – already. Its shared-source programme offers a selected number of customers, academics and partners access to the source code for some of its biggest products. But the move is a far cry from Google’s model. However, Google has shied away from the completely free software model advocated by open source hardliners like GNU pioneer Richard Stallman. Instead of the General Public License adopted by many of the most popular open source products, Google has opted for the less restrictive Apache license. This will allow phone manufacturers to add their own proprietary code to the Android code base. This, the company hopes, will encourage mobile makers to take up the platform, by enabling them to differentiate their phones from the competition without having to share their code with the world, as the GPL would require. That said, Microsoft is likely to take comfort in its current position from new statistics released last week. Software testing outfit uTest conducted a “Battle of the Browsers” competition, and identified 297 bugs in Chrome, 207 bugs in Firefox, and just 168 in Explorer. Ironically, uTest was using its study to promote the effectiveness of ‘crowdsourcing’ in software testing. So while it could be argued that IE had something of an advantage over its competitors thanks to a slightly smaller number of testers (356 testers for IE versus 514 for Firefox), it appears there might just be mileage in the closed source approach for a few years to come. Graham Taylor Dec 18, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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