One of the oft-touted benefits of Open Source software is the fast pace of development, in particular when there are problems. While this definitely improves with the popularity of the software, and so if you are using rare or niche software it may not be quite the same, it is great to see it in action in front of our eyes.
Since the release and rise and rise of Firefox 1.0, there have been a number of security vulnerabilities found. Before anyone moans about this, it is worth pointing out that this will happen with _all_ software, whether closed or open source. What is great is that you can see the real speed with which the community responds to these problems. In the case of some previous ones, we’ve seen fixes come out almost at the same time as the proof of concept, before anything comes ‘in the wild’. While the latest vulnerabilities have not been fixed in the ‘official’ version (1.0.3), there is already a release candidate for 1.0.4, which I suspect will become official within the next 24-36 hours.
On a related note, I would like to extend a formal welcome to the Open Source community to all Firefox users for whom it is their first foray into this new and exciting arena, and to advise of one rule that, I reckon, is often overlooked. It’s alright to moan. It may not be very ‘British’, but one of the vital things in an OSS project is users feedback with problems and feature requests. If something is broken, then report it, and it will be fixed. This does not come naturally to software users, IMHO, because we have become so used to having to ‘workaround’ software issues (“Just reboot”), or the feeling that once we’ve paid for the software the company aren’t really interested in what we think.
Bring on the bugs.
mrBen
