Comment by gucci-on-fleek

8 hours ago

I'm somewhat skeptical here, because I notified the FreeBSD security team of a vulnerability a few years ago, and I never got a response, even after a follow-up email a few weeks later. To be fair, my report was about a non-core component, and the vulnerability wouldn't be very easy to exploit, but Debian, OpenBSD, SUSE, and Gentoo all patched it within a week [0].

That being said, I'm not suggesting that anyone should judge an entire OS based off of how they handle a single minor report, since everything else that I've seen suggests that FreeBSD takes security reports quite seriously. But then you could also use this same argument for the Linux kernel bug, since it's pretty rare for a patch to be mismanaged like this there too :)

[0]: https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/luatex-vulnerabilities#timeline

Linux Kernel doesn’t differentiate between security bugs and other bugs, which is the main complaint here I think. They have the same process.

So the issue is bigger than the mishandling of a single issue, it’s a fundamental process issue around security for one of the most impactful projects in the entire space.