I tilted at the windmill of making and selling a secure RTOS for 10 years. It is a fool's errand, and everybody that likes money should stay away.
What I painfully learned is that hardly anybody save sometimes the US government is willing to compromise on features or pay 1 cent more for a secure RTOS.
Look at it another way. The market for cybersecurity is supposed to hit $300 billion by 2024, according to a recent report. If we only released secure software, that $300 billion market wouldn't exist. In that sense, it is vastly more economically viable to release insecure software than to spend any effort on securing it.
The broken window fallacy doesn't apply to software security for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that it isn't apparent that software is insecure until well after the sale, and depending on use (i.e. on a security network, etc), might actually be fit for purpose. In other words, measurement of window brokenness changes over time and with situation.
The other important difference is that the software vendor, unlike the glazier, doesn't directly benefit from folks breaking its software.
A better analogy is the introduction of the iPhone creating the iPhone accessories market. For lots of reasons, Apple decided not to make the iPhone crush proof, allowing Otter and others to sell protective cases for it.
To say that it's "vastly more economically viable" to spend $300 billion fixing insecure software rather than simply making it secure in the first place is fallacious.
If you made the software secure in the first place, you would have secure software and $300 billion to spend on something else (guns, butter, or what have you).
That seems like the very definition of the broken window fallacy to me---but hey, if not, it's still a fallacy.
Of course we haven't factored in the extra cost of making the software secure in the first place. If that costs vastly more than $300 billion, it is vastly more economically viable to just make broken software, but I don't think that was the intention of the statement.
What I painfully learned is that hardly anybody save sometimes the US government is willing to compromise on features or pay 1 cent more for a secure RTOS.
Look at it another way. The market for cybersecurity is supposed to hit $300 billion by 2024, according to a recent report. If we only released secure software, that $300 billion market wouldn't exist. In that sense, it is vastly more economically viable to release insecure software than to spend any effort on securing it.