A question for the open source people

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Thu Jun 19 06:35:04 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 17:47 -0700, Michael Harpe wrote:
> What I have always been curious about is this: how many of you
> actually take advantage of the open source? In other words, how many
> of you really take the source code and do something with it?

I haven't much.  I have hacked around with some closed source binaries
years ago.  Though, thanks to the closed source nature, there was very
little that I could have done with it.  And, I have messed around with
scripts, which is really not in the same league as tinkering with
programs, but not something that I could have done to the same degree
with closed binaries.

Trying to unravel someone else's thinking, to be able to tinker with
code, is a hard thing to do, even given open source code, even given
commented source code.

But I've certainly read comments from a few people on this list how
they'd looked at the source code to answer someone's query about
undocumented features, and debugging.

And theoretically, it gives a very good opportunity for automated
assessment of a program for eliminating common errors (e.g. buffer
overflows), and perhaps checking for malicious routines.

I'm prepared to put more faith in open source code than closed source
code.  Not just because someone can check it, but also because it's a
measure against being locked out.  I *have* suffered the situation where
we've written data using closed source programs that only the same
application can make use of, and we've lost access to that data.  Given
an open source program, or open standard, and a need, people do develop
ways to be able to read different forms of data.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.6-55.fc9.i686

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