Hacker News Reader

Comment by hazz | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I don't necessarily see diversity as a virtue, but more the ability to adapt. When choosing a tool, people will naturally pick the most popular one, provided it suits their needs. Open source allows for everyone to get up and move if a better alternative appears. It may be a 'monoculture' of sorts, but that doesn't have the same consequence as the biological parallel. Open source can adapt.

View on HN

Diversity is a virtue in that (much like in natural systems) it makes the community as a whole less vulnerable to any particular problem. Consider, specifically, software viruses/worms for instance - heard immunity logic should fit just as well as in the biological case; monoculture leads to more epidemics.

It is not with a cost, though - moving between different options and trying to get some measure of interoperation can be hard, which is why you get some concentrations at any given time.

The key differences between natural systems and computer systems is that vulnerabilities don't kill a piece of software, and there's no interbreeding. You don't get two types of emacs, one of which has a buffer overflow, breeding to produce a new emacs without the bug. You get top-down design, where the 'many eyes' theory dictates that new vulnerabilities should be found faster in a more popular code-base.

Evolutionary theory is useless for describing software vulnerabilities (presently), because the software on your computer doesn't get to pass on it's genes, hacked or not. It's a clone of every other download from the same source, and they're all systematically replaced by a new release with minimal feedback.

I was speaking of epidemiology, not evolution. I agree that there are quite significant differences between evolution of software and evolution of organisms, and evolution certainly has an impact on epidemiology, but monocultures are an epidemiological problem for reasons mostly unrelated to evolution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com