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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Well, to run with your analogy, I prefer things to be recyclable then to just throw them away.

    I agree with you - to a point. The linux kernel is too big and complex to understand all of it as a single person. However, its critical software. Meaning, we are not depending on some nerd to find a bug anymore. There are companies that look through critical code to check for security issues.

    Now imagine I made some somewhat popular open source server software that saved passwords in plaintext. Chances are good, that by sometime next week ill have someone on the internet scream at me for that. With proprietary software, no one is coming.

    (Maybe at the next code review, someone will say something, but proprietary software does not imply me working at a corporation, and corporation does not imply the software having to be closed source)

    Open source does not guarantee 100% secure software, but it does make obvious lapses in judgement much less likely. And sometimes, there IS a nerd who will look through the code because they wanted a feature, and finds a critical bug. Like the person that found the xz backdoor. The chance for that happening with closed source is zero.



  • A lot of drivers for hardware are actually not open source, just unreadable binaries that do …something. No one knows exactly how they work, so some people consider them a security risk.

    I think its because the linux kernel is GPL2, not the modern GPL3 like most free software, so I think thats why some components are allowed to be non-free. Not sure though.

    So, that practice violates the spririt of free software. So some distributions have those components removed. Its safer, but you may lose functionality, depending on what computer components you have.

    Its an important project, and judging by the other comments here, underappreciated.