

Ask HN: Which OS decision(OpensourceXproprietary) is conceptually more secure? - caglarsayin

Which OS decision is conceptually more secure Property based OS (MAC OS X) or Open Source OS(BSD, Linux) 
Yes, I know we might find the exact answer, but I just want to hear your opinion on this unanswerable question. Also, you can denote exact OS kernel or arch. as an answer if you have rational reasons
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dalke
I think your question is too broad because it's too easy to confuse the
different aspects of proprietary, free, commercial, source available, no cost,
support contract, and volunteer support.

Why not narrow it down?

Which do you think is more secure, the open source Darwin operating system or
the proprietary Mac OS X?

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agesdear
No doubt, open source ones are more secure. Esp. For simple end users like us,
it is at least as secure as we can see. Others are probably full of backdoors
which are embedded by NSA.

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dalke
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that proprietary OSes are never
available in source code form.

I learned operating systems from MINIX. Nearly all of the source code was
published in the back of the text book, and we had the kernel source code in
order to modify and experiment with the OS.

However, before April 2000 MINIX was neither free software nor open source.

I think it's fair to say that this non-open source/proprietary software was
not and could not be full of NSA backdoors.

Similarly, the original AT&T Unix distributions were also in source code form,
even though they were also proprietary. It's very hard (but not impossible!)
to hide backdoors in any software when you have the source code and the time
to review it in depth.

