[Ti] MS SQL 2000 Worm

[Chris Olson]

On Saturday, January 25, 2003, at 08:35 PM, XXL wrote:
> Why can't they ever get it right before they ship it? They always ship 
> Alpha
> CRAP.

I think it all boils down to dollars and lack of sense.  Get the 
product out the door to generate the dollars and forget having the 
sense to thoroughly test it first.  Actually, not an uncommon practice 
in the software industry.  Take a look at Redhat Linux - they don't 
wait for the mainstream kernels, instead their developers heavily patch 
the kernel to their own end, then they release a series of bug fixes 
thru the Redhat network over the next release cycle.  The KDE project 
does the same thing - release beta quality software, then several point 
releases that are primarily bug fixes.

> Maybe they can get away with  this because they have no real 
> competition due
> to their  monopoly status

I don't see it that way.  Pretty much everybody that sells or 
distributes software does it.

> Microsoft should have to pay the real costs sustained by their 
> customers
> because of their buggy trash.  They might do a little more testing if 
> they
> had to pay thru the nose instead of everyone else having to bear the 
> cost.

Microsoft does seem to have more security related problems than other 
software vendors.  But this latest worm is really old news.  The patch 
was available months ago to fix it. Same as Nimda - our servers still 
log gibberish from zombied MS IIS webservers over a *year* after the 
patch was made available to fix the problem.
--
Chris