Anyway, the reason I'm so pleased to read about KYS is because it is based on the LAMP architecture. That is, "Linux Apache MySQL PHP", which is a very common open-source web-serving setup, and indeed the one that I use. Linux is the Operating System, Apache provides the webserving functionality, MySQL is the database server, and PHP executes your code. What's more, KYS is based on RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux), which is just a hop-skip-and-jump (and money) away from my webserver's OS, which is Fedora Core 6.

The point is that the entire LAMP setup is open source, therefore depending upon the principle of "security not obscurity". What does that mean? Well it means that the security of the software is achieved because of its transparency... everybody can look at the code, so everybody can see potential security exploits, and therefore they are more likely to get fixed. Proprietary (or otherwise 'closed source') software, such as MS Windows, doesn't have this benefit, and as such tends to rely on its contents being obscured from the public eye. It might sound good, but with the number of people out there who reverse engineer stuff, it really isn't any security at all.

If I had an open source flag right now, I'd wave it. Viva la FOSS! :>>