At first blush, Microsoft hounds might want to pounce on Apple's release of over 80 vulnerability fixes this week. But before anyone bears that red M tattooed on their chest, you should take another look at Apple's updates.

Though Apple may not be very friendly to security researchers who plan to go public with Apple-born security issues, Apple is being a good open source citizen. Reportedly, over half the software security fixes this month are actually in or part of open source software (OSS) packages.

[Correction] Here's the list software updated, which includes open source software...

AFP Client, AFP Server, Apache, AppKit, Application Firewall, CFNetwork, ClamAV, CoreFoundation, CUPS, curl, Emacs, file, Foundation, Help Viewer, Image Raw, Kerberos, libc, mDNSResponder, notifyd, OpenSSH, pax archive utility, PHP, Podcast Producer, Preview, Printing, System Configuration, UDF, Wiki Server, and X11.

While I'm certainly no Apple fanboy, I give kudos to Apple. Whether or not it's just a necessary thing to do in order to keep OS X secure, there are some significant benefits to Apple's use of open source and Mac OS X being built on BSD.