I support free and open source software (FOSS) like VLC, Qbittorrent, Libre Office, Gimp…

But why do people say that it’s as secure or more secure than closed source software? From what I understand, closed source software don’t disclose their code.

If you want to see the source code of Photoshop, you actually need to work for Adobe. Otherwise, you need to be some kind of freaking retro-engineering expert.

But open source has their code available to the entire world on Github or Gitlab.

Isn’t that actually also helping hackers?

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    18·
    17 hours ago

    Somewhat of a different take from what I’ve seen from the other comments. In my opinion, the main reason is this:
    XKCD comic showing other engineers proud of the realibility of their products and then software engineers freaking out about the concept of computerized voting, because they absolute do not trust their entire field.

    Companies have basically two reasons to do safety/security: Brand image and legal regulations.
    And they have a reason to not do safety/security: Cost pressure.

    Now imagine a field where there’s hardly any regulations and you don’t really stand out when you do security badly. Then the cost pressure means you just won’t do much security.

    That’s the software engineering field.

    Now compare that to open-source. I’d argue a solid chunk of its good reputation is from hobby projects, where people have no cost pressure and can therefore take all the time to do security justice.
    In particular, you need to remember that most security vulnerabilities are just regular bugs that happen to be exploitable. I have significantly fewer bugs in my hobby projects than in the commercial projects I work on, because there’s no pressure to meet deadlines.

    And frankly, the brand image applies even to open-source. I will write shitty code, if you pay me to. But if my name is published along with it, you need to pay me significantly more. So, even if it is a commercial project that happens to be published under an open-source license, I will not accept as many compromises to meet deadlines.