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Yeah, a lot of this is about personal preferences, and preserving them across time and space. It's not always a bad thing. There's always a trade-off between co

Yeah, a lot of this is about personal preferences, and preserving them across time and space. It's not always a bad thing. There's always a trade-off between convenience, automation, predictability and security. Another good point spolu brings up: The chrome/ subdirectory of the chromium project (all that makes up the Google Chrome experience: tabs, settings, sync, omnibox) is made up of 5,343 C++ implementation files, adding up to 1,449,451 lines of C++ code (as of 2013/09/11). It's hardly tractable by one person, and hints to the fact that it's probably impossible for a one guy to modify it alone to come up with a profoundly different experience. This detail doesn't get a lot of discussion, but I think it's sometimes an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option. Lots of modern contraptions are simply too complex for any individual to ever claim a hope of gaining an honest understanding of their inner workings, nevermind an unskilled layman. At least, not without living like a cleric, cloistered away in the library of some convent or monastery for most of one's life. Sometimes I feel that the real hazard is that we gloss over the idea that we're trying to exert control over a massive arrangement of billions of transistors, however small they may be. If we were confronted with an elaborate array of ordinary light switches, and told to conquer the same tasks, I think it'd be easier to realize the true scale of some of the things we fiddle with on an everyday basis.

spolu 13y ago
Agreed. This is one tragedy of software in general (not only opensource)
fallse7en 13y ago
I don't think the studious hermit going over every line of open source code was how it was supposed to work either though. It's more just that you have lots of groups exercising the code and looking into various portions of the code - if every group decides "Yep, the portion we use/looked at is solid", then you gain some confidence that the code does what it's supposed to. The more groups using/perusing the code, the more confidence you gain.
brownbat 13y ago
> an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option ie, Given enough code, all reviews are shallow?
bithive123 13y ago
It's more than just the ability to audit, it's the ability to fix specific problems so you can focus on your business requirements. This happened to me recently -- I was using Apache in a rather unusual reverse proxy configuration and was unable to suppress (using the usual directives) certain headers which were causing problems upstream. I could have spent a long time researching other solutions or coming up with clean workarounds but at the end of the day it was quick and effective to simply edit mod_proxy_http.c and fix the problem directly. Now that the service is up again, I have time to come up with better solutions if I desire. When our closed systems misbehave, my only option is to shrug and ask if we have a support contract.
hnriot 13y ago
there really is no trade off between "convenience, automation, predictability and security." there's nothing magic about switching your machine off to increase security. It's just as vulnerable when you're using it, more so in fact. I'm not sure how shutting your machine off adds any predictability either. If you want to achieve the same thing just turn off wifi. For mac laptop users we get the best of both worlds, always state preserving, but essentially "off" when not in use. Sadly neither windows nor linux have ever got "sleep" right.

spolu 13y ago

Agreed. This is one tragedy of software in general (not only opensource)

fallse7en 13y ago

I don't think the studious hermit going over every line of open source code was how it was supposed to work either though. It's more just that you have lots of groups exercising the code and looking into various portions of the code - if every group decides "Yep, the portion we use/looked at is solid", then you gain some confidence that the code does what it's supposed to. The more groups using/perusing the code, the more confidence you gain.

brownbat 13y ago

> an essential fallacy of the very premise of the open source concept, that having the ability to audit source code, doesn't necessarily make it a realistic option ie, Given enough code, all reviews are shallow?

bithive123 13y ago

It's more than just the ability to audit, it's the ability to fix specific problems so you can focus on your business requirements. This happened to me recently -- I was using Apache in a rather unusual reverse proxy configuration and was unable to suppress (using the usual directives) certain headers which were causing problems upstream. I could have spent a long time researching other solutions or coming up with clean workarounds but at the end of the day it was quick and effective to simply edit mod_proxy_http.c and fix the problem directly. Now that the service is up again, I have time to come up with better solutions if I desire. When our closed systems misbehave, my only option is to shrug and ask if we have a support contract.

hnriot 13y ago

there really is no trade off between "convenience, automation, predictability and security." there's nothing magic about switching your machine off to increase security. It's just as vulnerable when you're using it, more so in fact. I'm not sure how shutting your machine off adds any predictability either. If you want to achieve the same thing just turn off wifi. For mac laptop users we get the best of both worlds, always state preserving, but essentially "off" when not in use. Sadly neither windows nor linux have ever got "sleep" right.