3 ms·
How, pray tell, does free change the problem except in fantasies? There is plenty of "free" software that contains the same problem.
by mucker 11y ago
How, pray tell, does free change the problem except in fantasies? There is plenty of "free" software that contains the same problem.
- rbanffy 11y agoAt least, with those, you can audit the code and have someone fix it. No such luck with proprietary software.
- mackal 11y agoFree as in freedom, not beer. You can look at the code of the free software, therefore tell if it's phoning home or not. More importantly, changing it.
- anigbrowl 11y agoHow many people have the time or inclination to validate everything that way?
- dripton 11y agoNot many, but the effort is parallelizable. If you find a security problem and report it in public, others can verify it, and still others can benefit from the fix even if they never would have bothered to look for themselves.
- creshal 11y agoIt doesn't take many. The problem is making sure that someone is doing it (cf., OpenSSL).
- morganvachon 11y agoExactly. This is how the Google Chromium always-on voice recognition payload was discovered, for example. We may never have known about it if it wasn't an open source project, or at least we wouldn't have heard about it until long after it shipped.