All it means is that those products are closed from public view, so no one outside the companies that own them has the faintest clue how many bugs they contain. And there's no way the limited set of developers and testers within those companies can test their products as well as the worldwide community constantly scrutinizing FOSS can.

Bugs in open source software also tend to get fixed immediately, as in the case of the Linux uncovered not long ago.

In the proprietary world? Not so much. Microsoft, for example, typically takes weeks if not months to patch vulnerabilities such as the recently discovered . Good luck to all the businesses using it in the meantime.

2. Quality

Which is more likely to be better: a software package created by a handful of developers, or a software package created by thousands of developers? Just as there are countless developers and users working to improve the security of open source software, so are there just as many innovating new features and enhancements to those products.