I'd agree with that argument for the general case. Yet, there have been proprietary systems that resisted attacks in their attack model (with source code!) for years and all were designed with established methods for increasing assurance. There's dozens of done that way, esp in defense and smartcard markets. There's a few OSS projects with either good design or code review (medium assurance) that were done by pro's and open-sourced. Far as the actual FOSS development model, there are zero high assurance security offerings done that way. That's despite decades of examples with details published in journals, on the web, etc to draw on. So, FOSS has never done high security, NSA pentesters did give up on a few proprietary offerings, and therefore FOSS is inferior to proprietary in high security because only one has achieved it. Matter of fact, the open-source, commercial MCP OS of Burroughs was immune to pointer manipulation and code injection in 1961 via two bits of tag. FOSS systems haven't equaled its security in five decades.
They need to catch up really quick because they could be the best thing for high assurance. The mere fact that there's tons of labor, they're free, and not motivated by commercial success avoids the main obstacles to high assurance, commercial development: that the processes are labor-intensive, difficult to integrate with their shoddy legacy stuff, and hard to sell. If FOSS ever groks it, they could run circles around the other projects and products in terms of assurance. Closest thing is the OpenBSD community but they use low-assurance methods that lead to many bugs they fix. Their dedication and numbers combined with clean-slate architecture, coding, and tools would produce a thing of beauty (and security).
And, yet, the wait for FOSS high assurance continues. If you know anyone wanting to try, Wheeler has a page full of FOSS tools for them to use:
They need to catch up really quick because they could be the best thing for high assurance. The mere fact that there's tons of labor, they're free, and not motivated by commercial success avoids the main obstacles to high assurance, commercial development: that the processes are labor-intensive, difficult to integrate with their shoddy legacy stuff, and hard to sell. If FOSS ever groks it, they could run circles around the other projects and products in terms of assurance. Closest thing is the OpenBSD community but they use low-assurance methods that lead to many bugs they fix. Their dedication and numbers combined with clean-slate architecture, coding, and tools would produce a thing of beauty (and security).
And, yet, the wait for FOSS high assurance continues. If you know anyone wanting to try, Wheeler has a page full of FOSS tools for them to use:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/high-assurance-floss.html