De-facto closed source: the case for understandable software

…the original author of any FOSS package or application, by publishing it, would have to accept as fact that any misuse of said software would forever be their responsibility, or at least until that responsibility is, diligently and ceremoniously, transferred to someone else, hot potato style.

FOSS was never about trust in software owners.

It was about not needing to trust them to begin with.

You want to download thousands of lines of useful, but random, code from the internet, for free, run it in a production web server, or worse, your user’s machine, trust it with your paying users’ data and reap that sweet dough. We all do. But then you can’t be bothered to check the license, understand the software you are running and still want to blame the people who make your business a possibility when mistakes happen, while giving them nothing for it? This is both incompetence and entitlement.

Plus how is this any different from using proprietary software? If you’re not going to take full advantage of FOSS, maybe you’re better off spending your money on support contracts anyway. At least then, you are entitled to complain until you’re blue in the mouth. Maybe you can even take someone to court!

We must make software simpler. Much much simpler. And companies who base their service offering on open source software must become more involved in keeping this ecosystem alive in whichever capacity they can.

Software must be made understandable. The essence of FOSS for me can be reduced to one fundamental computing right: the right to refuse to run, on my machines, code that I do not have the option to understand. That is it.

I’m not fundamentally opposed to closed source software, so as long as it runs on someone else’s computer.

However, as we’ve seen, having the source code is not enough to guarantee understandability.