this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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That was my concern, and why I brought up my point.
Human nature, especially when volunteer work versus paid work is being done, as well as someone who purposely over the long-term is trying to be devious, could be a potent combination for disaster.
I still wonder if there should be an actual open source project that does nothing but security audits of all other open source projects, hence my original question as an opener to a conversation that I never got to elaborate on because I was getting attacked almost immediately by people who are very sensitive about bringing any criticisms/concerns about open source out in the open.
The issue is that it implies that open source has a problem due to volunteers that is not found in closed source, which is not really the reality.
You can look at a closed source vendor like Cisco and see backdoors, generally left over from developer access, yet open for abuse. The nature of those is so blatantly obvious any open review would have spotted it instantly, yet there it was
With this, you had a much more device obfuscated attack that probably would have passed through even serious security audits unnoticed, yet it was caught because someone was curious about a slight performance degradation and investigated. Having been in the closed source world,I can tell you that they never would have caught someone like this. Anyone even vaguely saying they wanted to spend some time investigating a session startup delay of half a second would be chastised for wasting time.
Further, open source projects are also the fodder for security researchers to build their resumes. Hard to prove your mettle without works, and catching vulnerabilities in OSS code is a popular feather in their cap.
It also implies that open source is strictly a volunteer affair. Most commercial applications of a Linux platform involve paid employees doing some enablement, and that differs place to place. There's of course red hat paying for security research, Google, Microsoft also. I know at least one company that distrusts everything and repeats a whole bunch of security audits, including paying external companies to audit open source code. I would wager that folks downstream of say centos stream or certain embedded platforms can feel pretty good about audits. Of course all bets are off when you go grab yarballs, npm, pip, etc.
I (partially) disagree. Fundamentally, my belief is that someone who gets paid to do the work is more rigorous doing the work than someone who does it on a volunteer basis, a human nature thing. Granted, I'm speaking very generally, and what I stated is not always true, but still.
Also, corporations that write close source programs are much more legally adverse to being sued if their product fails (there's a reason why we're seeing so many corporations slapping in arbitration clauses into their agreements these days; risk-averse).
Open source projects tend to just be more careful about their code base not being tainted, and write in disclaimers ("As-is") to protect themselves legally for the failure of the product scenario, and call it a day (again, very generally speaking (I use Fedora specifically for a reason)).
And speaking of Fedora, I do agree with your point that some open source projects are actually done by paid coders. I just believe that's more of the outlier, than the norm, though. Some of that work is done by corporate employees, but still on a volunteer basis.
Not dismissing at all, I am thankful for corporations that actually spend time letting their employees do open source work, even if it's just for their own direct benefit, as it also benefits everyone else.