Well said. rms is still The Man as far as I'm concerned. So bash had a bug, big whoop-do-freaking-do... I guess Windows or Internet Explorer or ActiveX or Firefox or Chrome or Opera or Java or Flash never had exploitable bugs; oh, wait....

The takeaway from all this, to me, is simply to acknowledge that while "with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" may or may not be true, there's no easy way to know, a priori, how many eyeballs are "enough" - and Open Source projects (right alongside ALL software projects) should still utilize tools like static code analysis, fuzzing tools, should still have dedicated security audits from time to time, etc.

The other takeway is that "defense in depth" is still mantra number one for security. You can have a hole at any level, which means that every level must work to limit access to the greatest possible extent. A hope and prayer and expecting all software to be bug-free isn't going to cut it.

weev does no credit to Richard Stallman or his philosophy by insisting that either must be considered beyond criticism or above reproach, or suggesting that the controversy around things like Heartbleed and shellshock amount to character assassination, or casting him as, literally, a Sisyphean figure who practically singlehandedly created the modern software world, only to be cast aside by simpletons who can't comprehend his awesomeness.

Particularly, given the position of free software advocates themselves who are more than willing to deride, malign and condemn as immoral or evil any program that doesn't have a GPL attached.

I agree that making fun of his weight or his eccentricities is in poor taste, but his ideas are fair game, which is as it should be.

RMS may be right. Personally, I think he's right about a lot of things. But he didn't come down off the mountain with clay tablets written on by the finger of God.

Do this thought experiment. What if Torvalds (or the equivalent) had never created the Linux kernel and put it under GPL? Where would GNU be today? And would you be thinking RMS is The Man?