Comment by positron26
1 month ago
> more stress tested and vetted by more people
Grandma and grandpa aren't reading the source code and certainly not up at a professional level. This is one of the core misconceptions of the "free/libre" formulation of OSS.
> Grandma and grandpa aren't reading the source code and certainly not up at a professional level.
This is one of the core misconceptions of the anti "free/libre" formulation of OSS. Most users don't need to read the entire Debian source to know that it is safe to use. You are free to look up who maintains any part of the project and look at the history of changes that have been made. A lot of projects have nice, easy to read notes along with the actual code.
If you are so paranoid that you can't even trust open release notes then why would you trust a closed project at all?
> A lot of projects have nice, easy to read notes along with the actual code
This alone doesn't improve the quality of the source.
> Paranoid
Nothing to do with it. Please be logical. Having millions of people who can't program trust maintainers doesn't make those maintainers do better work.
The whole idea of more eyeballs is an appeal to a vision of crowdsourcing that was a new idea in the early internet. What we found out is that complacency sets in, the notes eventually don't mean anything, and most source code is not read.
This vision of more programmers spending more time reading other people's programs is wholly born from within programmer communities, from programmers talking to other programmers, forgetting that the average user will never program and not because they lack access. It's a romanticized ideal that is only even a plausible idea in a room full of programmers.
Until you focus on how the non-programmer is going to meaningfully improve the review and production of the open technologies, you will never have a scalable or equitable solution.
The non-programmer never going to meaningfully improve the review and production of the open technologies. The solution is to make a society where people are literate in the technology they rely on or suffer otherwise.
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I’m not suggesting grandpa reads code, contributors do. We all know that most commercial code is much shittier than open source. Sure, commercial code usually covers more edge cases and has better UX, but is cobbled together from legacy and random product asks.
> contributors do
More users != more contributors. As software gets more popular, you begin getting 10, 100, 1000, 1,000,000 users for every contributor.
This doesn't just affect non-programmers. We can't even police NPM.
People want it to be true so that it will be a talking point, but it's not true, and we need to find new talking points that align with facts that are evident outside the echo chambers.
NPM is... special... It's up to platform owners to set standards and police. NPM's failures have nothing to do with open source as a whole.
> We all know that most commercial code is much shittier than open source
Citation needed. Seriously.
I'm not the one who made that assertion, but... Windows Millenium Edition almost makes his case all by itself.
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> contributors do
I would argue most code of any license is not actually regularly audited if at all, and certainly nowhere near the levels people seem to think they are.
> We all know that most commercial code is much shittier than open source
citation needed
> I would argue most code of any license is not actually regularly audited if at all, and certainly nowhere near the levels people seem to think they are.
Every device should run OpenBSD. And only the audited part.