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Two Linksys mesh routers send sensitive information to an Amazon server without any encryption, according to Belgian consumer organization Testaankoop. The practice could leave passwords, wireless network…
You of course have some valid points, but I think they don’t just apply to OSS, but software in general. Software is often unmaintained, has bugs, and nobody really cares for it, that is true for both OSS and closed source.
Being OSS is always a boon in my opinion, as it enables people to take a look at it if they want to. There is no audit-duty, people can (within the license) do whatever they want, and that is a very good thing.
I didn’t really audit OSS, but that’s not the only boon OSS offers. For example, I wrote a rust tool that did something similar to
tee
so I just went and pulled up the source code of GNU tee. No problem (besides that C code feels so messy)Or another example: I develop a lot of rust. In rust, there are a lot of dependencies that offer very nice functionalities. I was developing a library to help make developing cli tools easier, and wanted to make a module for easily creating a repl (think bash but very dumb). There was a repl project that did some things I wanted, so it was no problem to just go and look at their source to see howbI voukd do my things.
As a result, I stay convinced that OSS is more trustworthy and more approachable for users and developers (Note that this effect is offset by gazillions of corporate money for closed source).