Re: Doom of Debian Re: Debian Weekly News - February 18th, 2003
Davide Inglima <st970743@educ.di.unito.it> writes:
> I have already begun to see growing disaffection to GNU/Linux by
> former enthusiast people, and this can simply spell the final doom on
> the credibility of open-source.
Ha ha ha... such `enthusiasts' are hardly a loss, I think...
The security advantages of `open source' are simply a nice bonus,
they're hardly the main reason for it's existance.
In any case, this is actually a sterling example of how source-code
availability and modifiability wins big: note that the easter-egg in
question was installed by the program's _author_ -- and because the
source code was available, the problem could in fact be found and
corrected, even if not immediately. If it was a proprietary program,
the easter-egg would still be there, and no one would be the wiser.
[Sure, there'd be less bad press, but that's like hiding your head
in the sand and claiming it's safe!]
The real issue is whether you trust the author/maintainer or not, and
whether the program is free-software/open-source/proprietary simply
makes no difference. Sure, most free-software/open-source software gets
lots of code from outside sources, but the program maintainer is almost
always _much_ more careful about reviewing contributions than debian
package maintainers are about reviewing what comes from the maintainer.
-Miles
--
Is it true that nothing can be known? If so how do we know this? -Woody Allen
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