this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Sure its secure, but is it verifiably secure?
I mean you can provide audit findings and results and it’s a pretty big part of vendor management and due diligence but at some point you have to accept risk in using open source software that can be susceptible to supply chain hacks, might be poorly maintained, etc or accept the risk of taking the closed source company’s documentation at face value (and that can also be poorly maintained and susceptible to supply chain attacks)
There’s got to be some level of risk tolerance to do business and open source doesn’t actually reduce risk. But it can at least reduce enshittification
It's pretty hilarious when people act like being open source means it's "more secure". It can be, but it's absolutely not guaranteed. The xz debacle comes to mind.
There are tons of bugs in open source software. Linux has had its fair share.
The XZ thing is actually a great point to open source's favor. All it took was some dude to figure it out.
If you try to inject maligned code, you will be found out. That can't happen with proprietary software.
It highlighted some pretty glaring weaknesses in OSS as well. Over worked maintainers, unvetted contributers, etc etc.
The XZ thing seems like we got "lucky" more than anything. But that type of attack may have been successful already or in progress elsewhere. It's not like people are auditing every line of every open source tool/library. It takes really talented devs and researchers to truly audit code.
I mean, I certainly couldn't do it for anything semi advanced, super clever, or obfuscated the way the XZ thing was.
But I agree, that the fact we could audit it at all is a plus. The flip side is: an unvetted bad actor was able to publish these changes because of the nature of open source. I'm not saying bad actors can't weasel their way into Microsoft, but that's a much higher bar in terms of vetting.
Proprietary software has to be caught being insecure to be "guilty of" being insecure. Free software can be publically verified, effectively "proven innocent" - a much higher standard.