The number of reported security vulnerabilities has gone up drastically. And so has the frequency, number, and volume of security patches. Which also makes the gap between fully supported distributions and ones with only partial security support larger. (Not every distribution provides full security upddates for the full announced life time of a release.)
How are you folks reacting to this?
This is a good thing for Open Source Software. Yes, there’s a lot of vulnerabilities discovered, but in time, most, if not all of them will be patched. Closed Source Software on the other hand will always have the sword of Damocles hanging over their head, as it will be uncertain if they’re fully patched…
Greg Kroah-Hartman (the 2nd person in command in Linux) recently had a public talk where he discussed the whole situation with vulnerabilities. There he predicted that this would calmn down for Linux eventually, since, due to it being open source, there was always attempts to uphold a certain level of code quality, so the number of issues are quickly reducing as they are being addressed. However, having spoken to some developers working on closed source projects, he revealed how terrified they all are with the current situation, since they never had this kind of pressure to keep good code, so the technical debt is crazy for them.