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The author of this post is right, to a degree, but his arguments are really weak. Here's it simply: -With OSS, your bugs are more likely to be caught. -Theref
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
The author of this post is right, to a degree, but his arguments are really weak. Here's it simply:
-With OSS, your bugs are more likely to be caught.
-Therefore, it's harder to maliciously hack the vehicle.
-Therefore, it's less likely the software will fail and kill someone.
-Therefore, not opensourcing your code is a liability, because not doing so makes your product killing someone more likely.
Or the auto companies could just admit the real reason why they don't want to OS their code: They're afraid of losing control of their product. Of people, even if they've voided the warantee, using their product in ways they didn't explicitly allow. Of losing their monopoly on support.
If you're going to be evil, at least give it to us straight...
- eridius 10y agoYour first claim is not true. What makes bugs more likely to be caught is having lots of eyes on the source. If you have a popular OSS project there's probably a bunch of people looking at it. But making something OSS does not guarantee that anyone will look at it. Meanwhile, proprietary software will still be examined by everyone who's paid to work on it. So really, the value of OSS in catching bugs is related to how interesting/popular the software is. Boring software is rather unlikely to catch many bugs by being OSS.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoBut the probabilty of people outside your org looking at your source if it's proprietary is zero. Said probability is nonzero for OSS. So yes, even in a low popularity OS project, there's a higher probability of more people setting eyes on it than proprietary software.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoIn this case, I was using eyes as a shorthand, but yes, you are correct.