Comment by eichin

15 hours ago

Huh - anyone recall other examples of open sourcing a product code base to mitigate a user trust issue? (In 2026 it's perhaps less powerful because "you're just going to feed it to some AI tool anyway" but I think it's an interesting attempt to make and I don't think I've seen it before...)

> it's an interesting attempt

I didn’t take it in a very positive way, myself. I don’t know if I got my money’s worth before I have seen the deliverable.

At least the quota reset is immediately visible, so I took that part seriously.

I feel like it has happened, but I certainly can't remember a specific time. It feels in a similar vein to the NSA releasing Ghidra to the public as open source software after the Snowden leaks.

I mean, on the contrary, imagine if the NSA released Ghidra as closed source software. In a sense they really did have to open source it to mitigate a serious user trust issue.

  • It just happened 2 months ago when xAI open-sourced Grok Build following a similar controversy (wholesale uploading of user repositories). Though ZCode's case here is way worse since there is literally no way to opt-out and the client will always ask the backend for credentials to upload.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926590