I happened to read the blog post called Open-Source Security Idiots which really is having a go at the poor Debian maintainer of OpenSSL for causing the recent much debated OpenSSL security problem in Debian and Debian-based distros.

While I think the author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is mostly correct about his criticism, I think he’s being far too specific and trying to pinpoint Debian and claiming that to be a single specific bad distro (and his additional confused complaint on Firefox vs Iceweasel just made the article lose focus).

As someone who’s involved in a bunch of projects that are being packed by a range of Linux distros, I can’t but to disagree. This habit of changing packages without passing the changes upstream is wide-spread and not limited to changes done by maintainers since it also includes mere bug reports. It is something that just about every distro is doing to at least some extent. It varies from package to package and over time, but given an overview I honestly can’t say that there’s a single specific distro that is worse than the others. It is a disease that follows the distros and we must all help out to exterminate it.

Of course, the upstream projects also need to be aware of this and help pushing packagers of their software to behave.