I'm missing some context. I'm assuming the author is referring to binary distributions of open-source software? Otherwise, "reproducible builds" means something

I'm missing some context. I'm assuming the author is referring to binary distributions of open-source software? Otherwise, "reproducible builds" means something slightly different in a commercial software development environment. (Think of someone building an e-commerce site where the software is proprietary.) Thus: > You don’t need reproducible builds No, not for open source. If it's open source, it's only valuable and useful to have the source code if I can build it. Otherwise, if I can't build it, to me it's no different than closed source. > You don’t need reproducible builds In a commercial development environment I need to build the code I work on. What about when a bug exists due to problems in the build environment? If I can't reproduce the build environment, I can't fix the bug.