> If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell

> If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell — whereas the bad actor would not be able get away with such nefariousness if you had access to the source code. But it's true. People act more socially if they think they are watched or they think they could be watched. They don't actually have to be watched. If people think their source code will be examined, they will do less antisocial things. It is very rare to have deliberately malicious features in free software, whereas we have a whole class of dark patterns in dark software. The exceptions are things like Chrome or Firefox that are such giant and unwieldy codebases that they might as well be opaque boxes. In the case of Chrome, the Chrome builds you use contain secret sauce from Google in order to make it easier for Google to show you ads, different from Chromium. Firefox occasionally also tries to embed anti-user features, but then distributors such as Debian may notice them and remove them when repackaging the software. Again, these two are rare cases.