Aha, wasn't that argument more about that closed source software is more likely to hide stuff you don't agree with, than FOSS? Not necessarily that FOSS won't have any viruses or malware, but it's at least less likely. That was my take away, but long time ago I read the book admittedly, I might misremember or transformed it automagically over time.
This is my takeaway as well. Having the source code open makes it auditable, if not by you, maybe the community.
The free software license specifically gives the software an extra advantage in that changes to the software must be shared openly, if distributed as as binaries.
> source code open makes it auditable, if not by you, maybe the community
I think part of why this social engineering works so well is it takes advantage of that "many eyes" trust, where people are prone to delegating the responsibility of checking to the community and not do due diligence on themselves. I know I'm susceptible to it if I see a Github repo with more than 10k stars on it.
I don't know, I feel like the "numbers" like upvotes, stars, favorites or whatever stops working for me the second I see it being obviously gamed, and when there is a ton of services for buying "higher $number". GitHub stars probably stopped mattering around 2016-17 sometime, I think that's the first time I came across one of those "increase $number" services.
By now (imo), the entire web is gamed and no number can be trusted, I operate completely on a qualitative basis rather than quantitative, basically the only way I can get something out of the web. Ignore all and any numbers as any indication of anything.
You'd better read it again, because that claim does not figure in that text. You might mean that with more eyes on the code, more bugs are found, than with no eyes on the code. But that is not what you are saying here.
Aha, wasn't that argument more about that closed source software is more likely to hide stuff you don't agree with, than FOSS? Not necessarily that FOSS won't have any viruses or malware, but it's at least less likely. That was my take away, but long time ago I read the book admittedly, I might misremember or transformed it automagically over time.
This is my takeaway as well. Having the source code open makes it auditable, if not by you, maybe the community.
The free software license specifically gives the software an extra advantage in that changes to the software must be shared openly, if distributed as as binaries.
> source code open makes it auditable, if not by you, maybe the community
I think part of why this social engineering works so well is it takes advantage of that "many eyes" trust, where people are prone to delegating the responsibility of checking to the community and not do due diligence on themselves. I know I'm susceptible to it if I see a Github repo with more than 10k stars on it.
I don't know, I feel like the "numbers" like upvotes, stars, favorites or whatever stops working for me the second I see it being obviously gamed, and when there is a ton of services for buying "higher $number". GitHub stars probably stopped mattering around 2016-17 sometime, I think that's the first time I came across one of those "increase $number" services.
By now (imo), the entire web is gamed and no number can be trusted, I operate completely on a qualitative basis rather than quantitative, basically the only way I can get something out of the web. Ignore all and any numbers as any indication of anything.
You'd better read it again, because that claim does not figure in that text. You might mean that with more eyes on the code, more bugs are found, than with no eyes on the code. But that is not what you are saying here.
Here is the relevant quote from _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_[1], which was given the name _Linus's Law_[2] in honor of Linus Torvalds:
> Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law