Comment by nik282000
1 month ago
> 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.
And the solution to cavities is to increase self-dentistry literacy? The solution to a bridge collapsing is to increase civil engineering literacy? The solution to a plane crash caused by a cracked turbine blade is to increase casual aerospace engineering literacy? How much of how many literacies will we be willing to acquire so as to balance the responsibility we ask of every other profession and even those who are low and unskilled?
This incredibly selfish point of view put forth by a particular sect of _OSS polls sufficiently well at the engineer's only meeting in Palo Alto and nowhere else.
When people were coming up with the idea of computer literacy being ubiquitous like math, they meant math like addition and subtraction. To make the kind of impact that "free/libre" advocates want the everyday Joe to be responsible for, Joes need to know the CS equivalents of perturbation theory and how to solve partial differential equations. It's not happening, but believing that it can happen allows those ostensibly in favor of it to keep acting like they have a plan, like they want a solution.
As long as the hardware hacker is stuck in the mindset of what 0.01% of users want to do with devices, while they may find sympathy from the 0.1% who are software engineers, many of whom gather on this site, this is not even blowing at the gauge from halfway across the room in terms of moving the needle. Either figure out what is important to the consumer and how it aligns with your interests or just go home.
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