This is my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. I do not believe open source software encourages "hacking" or the making of spyware or viruses. Windows is the largest closed source OS and it has millions of viruses, spyware, rootkits, etc. So close source hasn't been that successful. That being said we don't know how open source software would react with the same number of attacks, I would think it would fair better but this is my opinion. I believe the community is pretty good about notifying users of any threats, and producing patches for vulnerabilities. Windows is closed source and is the biggest target in the market but if they opened up there OS then allot of the vulnerabilities might get patched by the community. (Same goes with Apple) A bad guy will find a way to do what they want no matter what OS they use I perfer to put my faith in the community, as compared to a corporation which will do what ever they want and I have no control. Again this is just my opinion, I believe everyone would be better served if everyone could work on making the OS better and patching things, but Linux doesn't have a big enough market share to see how it would do against the bad guys as compared to microsoft. Who knows maybe in the future we will be able to compare. Only time will tell.

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