Open source software is being vilified once again and, in some circles, even considered a national security threat. Open source software risk has been a recurring theme: First it was classified as dangerous because anyone could work on it and then it was called insecure because nobody was in charge. By Josh Bressers.
Let’s consider where open source stands today. It’s running at minimum 80% of the world. Probably more. Some of the most mission-critical applications and services on the planet (and on Mars) are open source. The reality is, open source software isn’t inherently more risky than anything else. It’s simply misunderstood, so it’s easy to pick on.
The article then discusses:
- Myth 1: Open source software is a risk because it isn’t secure
- Myth 2: Open source software is a risk because it isn’t high quality
- Myth 3: Open source software is a risk because you can’t trust the people writing it
- The true risk of open source software
In an era where the use of open source software is only increasing, the true risk in using open source — or any software for that matter – is failing to understand how it works. In the early days of open source, we could only understand our software by creating it. There wasn’t a difference between being an open source user and an open source contributor. Nice one!
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